Put It to a Vote!

Unfortunately I'm just not very witty like many of you out there in the blogosphere, so I thought some of you might assist me with the title of my book. When I told my students the title they all exclaimed "wow, long title". So what do you think:

The Transcendental Empiricism: Between Aesthetics and Representation

or

Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and Ontology of Immanence

I'm partial to the latter as I like "and" titles, but who knows. Additionally, I wonder if anyone would like to help me in proofing the manuscript once the galleys come in. The plan is for the book to go into production by April, so things are going to be extremely hectic during the next few months. Being the poor bloke that I am, I can't offer money, but I can offer acknowledgement.

At the Request of Noah-- Book Abstract and Table of Contents

The Transcendental Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze: Between Representation

Aesthetics

In this book I seek to unfold the significance and implications of Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism. Where many interpretations of Deleuze’s metaphysics treat his transcendental empiricism as a variant of sense-data empiricism based on the primacy of the given, I instead argue that Deleuze’s position is a hyper-rationalism that seeks to determine the conditions under which the given is produced or the conditions of real experience. Consequently, Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism represents a substantial departure from classical empiricism in that it does not treat the given as epistemically primitive, but instead seeks to determine how it is produced. Thus, the empiricist dimension is to be situated in terms of how the given is produced and what conditions allow for the production of the given. It is for this reason that Deleuze philosophy remains a transcendental.

If Deleuze’s position is better conceived as a hyper-rationalism, then this is because he discovers intelligibility in the given itself. For Deleuze the sufficient reason of the given is to be found in the differentials of being that preside over the genesis of the given. Since these differentials are intelligible, rational structures governed by rule-like processes, Deleuze is able to collapse the oppositions between the sensible and the intelligible and passivity and activity that has governed the manner in which metaphysical problems have unfolded throughout the history of philosophy.

In this way Deleuze is also able to collapse the implicit distinction between finitude and infinitude, and show how the finite differs only in degree, not kind, from the infinite. If this distinction collapses, then this is because the ability to create objects (givens) through thinking them is no longer understood as belonging solely to divine, infinite beings such as God, but is a property shared in degree by finite creatures as well. As such, Deleuze’s thought marks a heroic attempt to depart from the reigning philosophical alternatives of phenomenology, logical analysis, pragmatism, post-modernism and post-structuralism, all of which evolved as responses to Kant, by undermining the central premises of finitude and the passive receptivity of intuition upon which they are based.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS v

INTRODUCTION 6

1. EMPIRICISM AND THE SEARCH FOR THE CONDITIONS OF 23

REAL EXPERIENCE

1.1 Two Critical Problems of Transcendental Empiricism 23

1.2 Difference, Diversity and Empiricism 32

1.3 External Difference and Transcendental Philosophy 37

1.4 Between Conditioning and Genesis 41

1.5 Between Chaos and Individuation: The Forced Vel of 48

Representational Philosophy

1.6 Variations of Difference: The Topological Essences of Intuition 58

2. BERGSONIAN INTUITION AND INTERNAL DIFFERENCE 67

2.1 Internal Difference 67

2.2 Bergsonian Intuition 70

2.3 Internal Difference and the Intensive Multiplicity of Duration 73

2.4 Intensive and Extensive Multiplicities 78

2.5 Conditions of Real Experience 81

2.6 Topological Essences and Singular Styles of Being 85

3. TRANSCENDENTAL EMPIRICISM: THE IMAGE OF THOUGHT 97

AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE ENCOUNTER

3.1 Deleuze Contra Bergson 97

3.2 The Image of Thought 105

4. FIRST MOMENT OF THE ENCOUNTER: THE SENTIENDUM 120

4.1 Imperceptible Encounters 120

4.2 The Sentiendum, or That Which Can Only Be Sensed 123

4.3 Deleuzian Faculties and the Joints of Being 126

4.4 Signs of the Transcendental 128

5. SECOND MOMENT OF THE ENCOUNTER: THE MEMORANDIUM 133

5.1 The Ontological Structure of Problems and the Encounter 133

5.2 Ontological Memory: The Being of the Past 135

5.3 Memory and the Passage of the Present 140

5.4 The Virtual Causality of Structure 145

5.5 The First Paradox of Memory: Contemporaneity 147

5.6 The Second Paradox of Memory: Coexistence 151

5.7 The Third Paradox of Memory: The Pre-Existence of the Past 156

5.8 The Fourth Paradox of Memory: The Co-Existence of the Past 157

with Itself

5.9 Freedom and Destiny 162

5.9.1 The Force of Memory 170

6. THIRD MOMEMENT OF THE ENCOUNTER: THE COGITANDUM 175

6.1 The Explication of Problems 175

6.2 The Moral Image of Thought 181

6.3 The Being of Thought: Essence 186

6.4 Difference: The Transcendental Condition of the Diverse Given 190

6.5 Essence and the Metaphysical Structure of Point of View 196

6.6 Problems and the Dialectical Illusions of Being 203

6.7 Kant and the Being of Problems 206

6.8 The Insistence of Problems 212

6.9 Structural Essences 218

7. OVERCOMING SPECULATIVE DOGMATISM: TIME AND THE 227

TRANSCENDENTAL FIELD

7.1 The Threat of Dogmatic Schwärmerei 227

7.2 The Kantian Split Subject 231

7.3 Towards a Third Copernican Revolution 235

7.4 Time Out of Joint 239

7.5 The Becoming-Identical of the Different: The Event of Time 245

and the Subject of Difference

7.6 Beyond the Subject: Deleuze’s Hyper-Critical Turn 251

7.7 The Limits of Recognition 254

7.8 The Genetic Conditions of Experience: The Three Moments of 256

Ideas

7.9 Chance and Necessity: The Eternal Return 262

7.9.1 Beyond Individuation and Chaos: The Singular 267

7.9.2. The Transcendental Field and Deleuze’s Speculative Turn 270

7.9.3 Individuation and the Being of Singularity 277

8. INDIVIDUATION: THE GENESIS OF EXTENSITIES AND THE 282

STRUCTURE-OTHER

8.1 Three Problems Pertaining to the Process of Actualization 286

8.2 Indi-Different/ciation and the Genesis of Extensities 286

8.3 The Principle of Sufficient Reason: Indi-Different/ciation 290

8.4 The Static Time of Actualization 298

8.5 The Time of Sufficient Reason 300

8.6 The Spatialization of Intensive Time 302

8.7 The Intensive Factors of Actualization 303

8.8 Implication and Explication 307

8.9 Depth and Extensity 312

8.9.1 Depth and the Image of Thought 314

8.9.2 The Genesis of Individuals and Persons 315

8.9.3 The Moral Ground of the Image of Thought 323

CONCLUSION 335

REFERENCE MATTER 340

Celebration Time!

I've just received confirmation from Northwestern University Press that my study of Deleuze, The Transcendental Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze: Between Aesthetics and Representation has finally been fully confirmed and is due out in Fall of 2007.

Pre-Conference Rush-- Apocalyptic Meditations

This weekend I'll be in Las Vegas for the 19th annual Far West Popular and American Cultural Association Conference, where I'm presenting a paper entitled:

Enjoy Your Apocalypse! Apocalyptic Fantasies, Jouissance, and
Social Symtpoms in Life Under Post-Industrial Capitalism

Basically I'll be engaging in a lame analysis of how apocalyptic narratives are ciphers for the subject's relationship to the impossible-real of society, to the fact that society doesn't exist, envisioning the possibility of surmounting this real through a collapse of the current social configuration. Through an analysis of Armageddon and The Day After Tomorrow, I hope to show the structure at work in rightwing and leftwing versions of this fantasy, where in the former apocalypse results from the alien outsider or invader (the meteor hurtling towards earth) such that defeating this invader allows society to reallign itself in terms of an organic community no longer beset upon by intrusive government or misguided liberals (the film begins with Bruce Willis hitting golfballs at a Greenpeace boat protesting his oil drilling); whereas in the latter apocalypse results from the self-reflexivity of the social where our own acts lead to our destruction (thus films such as Terminator, the Matrix, and I, Robot belong to this genre as well), and the apocalypse functions to overcome nationalistic and ethnic tensions (the famous celebration scene in the third Matrix film, Mexico hosting U.S. citizens in The Day After Tomorrow), and re-establish familial and sexual bonds. K-Punk has argued that the films I describe as apocalyptic are, in fact, survivalist. However, I would argue that all apocalyptic narratives are survivalist, in that they all envision a form of post-apocalyptic subjectivity that now lives in peace, prosperity, and harmony. For instance, in many Christian apocalyptic narratives, a thousand years of peace are said to follow the final battle between good and evil or Christ and Satan.

Ultimately I would like to end with a brief discussion of Zizek's parallax, arguing that what these films represent is the impossibility of the social itself, or, rather, that the social is not one or the other (communitarian organic bonds versus collections of autonomous and self-determining individuals), but rather the very tension between these two conceptions of the social. Somewhere in there I plan to plug our discussions here in the academic blogosphere, but I really won't have the time or space to develop them as they should be developed.

Generally, I don't like to present at these sorts of conferences as I always feel a bit silly in my pop-cultural analyses, always finding them a bit facile (K-Punk, Jodi Dean, and Foucaultisdead are far better at this sort of thing), and feeling more at home in the arid world of theory. But a friend asked me to be on his panel and it's a chance to see Las Vegas, which I've never before visited. At any rate, I probably won't have much time to write over the next couple of days as I'm busily pulling all this together at the last minute. If any of you happen to be at this conference, drop by and have a gander. Our panel is entitled "Religious Appeal(s)" and is at 1:45 on Saturday... My paper was originally entitled "Secular Theologies" and I was going to argue that certain forms of religion are a structure of thought (it's necessary for me to defer to Anthony Paul Smith's claim that religion is not a univocal concept or that religion does not exist), not a set of ontological commitments to the divine, but rudely changed the topic at the last minute.

In the meantime, N.Pepperell has written a beautiful and challenging summation of where we're at in our ongoing dialogue over at Rough Theory, that is well worth the read. Hopefully I'll have more to say about this when I return. Siren's song indeed. I'd much rather be thinking of those issues than working on this paper.

* Picture shamelessly filched from K-Punks blog. My friend Melanie tells me that people like visual aids. The Platonist in me recoils.

Don't Give Way on the Trolls! (UPDATED with a Response from my Interlocutor and Some Nifty Spelling Corrections)

One of the great joys of blogging is that you open yourself to a public that can then descend upon your comment boxes and email account with their pet obsessions and concerns, furious about some imagined slight that you can hardly comprehend and which is, at any rate, quite unrelated to your project. In the last couple of days I've been fortunate to become acquainted with this pleasure, having my blog obsessively visited by a particular blogger and my email account filled with endless rantings about Slavoj Zizek. Proceeding on the basis of quotes such as the following, the offended interlocutor informs me that Zizek is inherently racist and that dialectics necessarily leads one to advocate positions such as Zizeks:

Because the Balkans are part of Europe, they can be spoken of in racist clichés which nobody would dare to apply to Africa or Asia. Political struggles in the Balkans are compared to ridiculous operetta plots; Ceausescu was presented as a contemporary reincarnation of Count Dracula. Slovenia is most exposed to this displaced racism, since it is closest to Western Europe: when Kusturica, talking about his film Underground, dismissed the Slovenes as a nation of Austrian grooms, nobody reacted: an 'authentic' artist from the less developed part of former Yugoslavia was attacking the most developed part of it. When discussing the Balkans, the tolerant multiculturalist is allowed to act out his repressed racism.)

The disgruntled interlocutor then goes on to say,

I have to elaborate a bit more because you may not be aware of the cultural context (Yugoslavia) - where I come from. Zizek had a stormy fight with the Serbian director Emir Kusturica, who made the film ''Underground'' about the break-up of Yugoslavia. IRRESPECTIVE of the politics I would like you to notice how Zizek's dialectics puts him into an incredible absurdist loop that I find not only irresponsible but downright shocking for an intellectual of his stature (or of the stature he enjoys at the Western academia). Zizek is here blaming Kusturica for acting out his repressed racism on Slovenia. (And as I said let's not discuss this politically). Then, he calls Kusturica ''an authentic artist'' (a derisive notion referring to so-called ethnic culture and Kusturica's love of anarchism and the Gypsy culture) who attacked the ''most developed part of Yugoslavia'' (Zizek puts Slovenia in the position of cultural superiority here). In effect, Zizek is the one who is projecting his repressed racism towards the ''less civilized'' Balkan ''tribes'' on Kusturica's film. He slams his own thesis here right into his own face.

If this sounds like a promising dialectic to you, I wish you luck with Zizek! I gave up on him a long time ago.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg with respect to the 12 comments and emails I've received within the last 24 hours, which, I fear, are actually causing me to become more stupid than I already am. I confess that I am completely baffled by this correspondent or what his aims might be. In the first place, I fail to see the racism that the author is referring to. Rather, Zizek makes the simple point that talk of the Balkans is somehow exempted from the prohibition against using crass stereotypes that are forbidden in discussions of other groups such as blacks, Jews, women, Asians, etc. Zizek may be right, he may be wrong. Zizek does seem right about this much: That during the war it was considered permissible to talk about those in the Balkans employing the most crass stereotypes. Those from the Balkans were described as being primative and tribalistic, as riddled with ancient conflicts, subject to emotional outbursts and innate brutality, etc., etc. In the States there was even a best selling book that based itself on this very thesis: Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts. If my unsolicited interlocutor is bothered by what Zizek has to say, he ought to read this book. Perhaps he might gain a little perspective as to what Zizek is trying to say. Nor am I quite clear as to what, precisely, is dialectical about the above cited quote from Zizek.

But more basically, I'm simply not deeply invested in any of the various cultural analyses Zizek presents in his writings. Rather, I'm interested in Zizek because of his rather unique understanding of Hegelian dialectic and because of the various insights he gives me about Lacan which I sometimes agree with and sometimes disagree with. What is it that this correspondent hopes to accomplish with his interventions? Does he wish to convince me that Zizek is worthless? Well that certainly won't happen as I've already found too much of value in Zizek. Is he trying to convince me that Zizek is racist? Is he just looking for someone to listen to him as others won't? All of it is quite tiresome. If you want to level critique, by all means do so, but please proceed in a philosophical fashion, informed by actual psychoanalytic theory and by the philosophers being discussed... A link to an article by someone who only has rudimentary background with Lacan and Hegel certainly doesn't cut it, nor does it resolve the question of alternative interpretations. But above all, leave your pet obsessions at home. I'm just not interested.

The author seems to believe that somehow dialectics inherently leads to claims such as that quoted above. This is a bit like suggesting that because some use formal logic incorrectly, formal logic inherently leads to these unsound conclusions, or that because Heidegger became a Nazi, anyone who talks about "being-in-the-world" is destined to become a Nazi. Or, drawing on another example, Freud has some pretty unkind things to say about Eastern Europeans, going so far as to say that they cannot be analyzed due to their lack of morality. Does this suggest that Freud, in toto, should be consigned to flames, or that this particular thesis should be rejected as a prejudice among truths? Or what of Nietzsche's attitude towards women? At any rate, what baffles me most of all, is why these claims are being addressed to me or how they have anything to do with issues I've been discussing here on this blog. Somehow I feel as if I've been caught in the cross-fire of a rightwing nationalistic ideologue whose ire was raised by some interpretation or other of Zizek's that hit the mark. Take it elsewhere please! Somehow I've become a surrogate for Zizek, becoming the object of this person's hostility towards the Slovenian.

There are days when others and their immersion in conflicts of jouissance deeply try my patience and sense of charity, when I find myself clearly understanding the motivation for unfolding intellectual projects in the serene space of journals and presses with limited run prints. Whatever. Yeah, Zizek says some pretty stupid things sometimes. He also says some pretty illuminating things. Get yourself a threshing machine please and leave me alone!

UPDATE: My interlocutor has kindly clarified his aims here and in my email with regard to Zizek. I suspect that Zizek's take on Balkan politics isn't even on the radar for most readers of his work, but it would be interesting to hear more from others who know a bit more about Zizek and the history of the Balkan political constellation. An important point here is that Zizek's analysis of the role that jouissance plays in ideology certainly does not exempt him from being caught up in those same mechanisms of jouissance and fantasy. As Lacan liked to say, there is no metalanguage. On the other hand, the fact that an analyst is herself caught up in transference and the unconscious does not delegitimate analysis either. It would be interesting to hear Dejan to give a more complex analysis of what he believes to be going on in Zizek's observations of The Sound of Music. What does he believe Zizek is claiming and how does he think Zizek is relating it to racism?

Symbolic Castration

There are periods where I find that everything I'm doing suddenly collapses. Or rather, it's not that anything collapses, but rather it's as if all my drive suddenly disappears and the things that hitherto held my fascination become dark and grey, pallid, as if they no longer hold the allure of promise they once had. That's the way it is with desire, I think... Desire renders a portion of the world luminous to the exclusion of everything else, elevating some single element or series of elements to a stand-in for everything else, and when desire loses its force it's as if the entire world collapses and I'm like one of those zombies from a b-film just shuffling along without any particular interesting in anything. Indeed, this might be a particularly apt metaphor, as these zombie always seem to desire the brains and flesh of the living, of those still animated with desire, as if, like cannibals, they might consume the desires animating others to kickstart their own desire. Is the evaporation of my desire the result of being on vacation for too long and thereby not having the requisite antagonism and sense that my enjoyment has been stolen to animate me? Is it that I've had too many successes lately and therefore experience myself in the midsts of a malaise?

What is particularly frustrating about the evaporation of desire is that the desire to write insists. For the blessed Lars of Spurious, the question is always one of how to continue to write, and he has gone so far as to conceive a writing that is not driven by content but a content driven by writing. Yet what of this desire to write in the first place, this oppressive sense that I am somehow violating some duty if I don't write? Is this not the phenomenon of phallus or symbolic castration? As Zizek puts it,

The status of possibility, while different from that actuality, is thus not simply deficient with regard to it. Possibility as such exerts actual effects which disappear as soon as it 'actualizes' itself. Such a 'short-circuit' between possibility and actuality is at work in the Lacanian notion of 'symbolic castration': the so-called 'castration-anxiety' cannot be reduced to the psychological fact that, upon perceiving the absence of the penis in woman, man becomes afraid that 'he also might lose it.' 'Castration anxiety' rather designates the precise moment at which the possibility of castration takes precidence over its actuality, i.e., the moment at which the very possibility of castration, its mere threat, produces actual effects in our psychic economy. This threat as it were 'castrates' us, branding us with an irreducible loss. (Tarrying With the Negative, 159)

In this context Zizek is speaking specifically of the manner in which power functions. What is important where power is concerned is the threat of force and not the exercise itself. That is, a certain potentiality is seen as pervading intersubjective relations-- the potentiality of violence --and this potentiality leads to transformations at the level of actuality or how we act. However, generalizing the notion of symbolic castration or the phallic function, then, it can be said that symbolic castration is that moment where possibility enters the world, where the world becomes haunted by incompleteness, and this incompleteness compels us to produce regardless of whether there is any need to produce. Over and above the need to communicate something, over and above the aim of "padding my CV", or intervening in some situation, there is the insistent call to write even where there is nothing and no reason to write. And even though there is no concrete call to write anything, even though there is nothing to be accomplished in writing, even though there is nothing to be said, I nonetheless feel as if I am failing in some crucial way when I'm not writing, that something in the world is fundamentally incomplete. Why should writing function as such an aim in itself? And why must I feel so wretched when I have nothing to write?

Back Again!

Well, I'm back and exhausted. The interviews went exceptionally well and I think I performed better than I ever have. Hopefully I'll land some on campus interviews, but if this doesn't come to pass I'm giving myself the narrative that the schools were simply looking for something very specific or that I have some tick that they couldn't bear. I go away knowing that regardless of what happens I did my best.

This was one of those conferences where everything just seemed to fall into place. I hadn't gotten assigned seating for the plane when buying the tickets and asked if there were any aisle seats towards the front of the plane, only to be given seat 1D. Front row joe. When I got to the hotel they apologized for having to change my room and told that they had to upgrade my room to a concierge suite free of charge. I was definitely infuriated by this... Not.

The conference was a truly enjoyable experience. The first night there I got to meet with my old dissertation director, Andrew Cutrofello, to prep for the interviews. It was great to see him and mostly we just chatted about the different things we're working on. I was talking a mile a minute and fear that I might have broken his ear. It seems that everywhere I went I struck up random conversations with people. I went to lunch the first day with one of my colleagues at my current position and a group of his old graduate school friends. There I had the pleasure of meeting Farhang Erfani who created the fantastic blog Continental Philosophy. When I heard him mention his blog I said "I know you!" and told him that he had archived some of my own writing here. He exclaimed "you're Larval Subjects!?!" And I said "Yes, I'm Sinthome in the flesh!" I felt as if I should have a special t-shirt with an "S" or "L" inscribed on it and a mask. We had a terrific conversation about Sartre and Lacan's connections to Sartrean thought that I hope to continue in the future.

The next day I met a nice woman in the elevator who seemed to take a shine to me as I live in Texas where much of her family lives. As it turns out, her husband organized the entire conference and she asked me for my card so he could help me out with my job search in any way possible. I'm not quite sure why she made this gesture as I didn't talk about any of my research, but it was nice nonetheless. Last night I had a terrific time talking to a Palestinian brother and sister from Texas in the bar (he was a political scientist presenting on Levinas and she's an environmental attorney now living in D.C.). Around four this morning the fire alarm went off and we all had to evacuate the hotel (which turned out to be nice as I got to see Patricia Huntington who was on my dissertation committee and met a number of interesting philosophers). Somehow a couch had caught on fire and water was dripping through the ceiling of the lobby and down the elevator shafts. We didn't get to return to our rooms until 6am (those on the 6th and 7th floor couldn't return until 7 or 8), but it was one of those magical moments where all social inhibitions and heirarchies are lifted and everyone talks to everyone. Nonetheless, I feel sorry for those who had to interview today.

While there I finally got to meet Miguel de Beistegui, author of the brilliant Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology. For those who are not yet familiar with this work, this is a brilliant piece of philosophy, spanning the deadlocks of what he calls "ousiology" or substance based metaphysics of presence from Parmenides to Husserl, and showing how Heidegger and Deleuze formulate a differential ontology that escapes these deadlocks (Deleuze here being the hero). In my view, this work sets a new benchmark for Deleuze scholarship and is one of a handful of genuinely philosophical studies of his work (which is thankfully free of that "tone" that characterizes so much work on Deleuze). I was pleased to see Dan Smith and Constantin Boundas, and both of them gave excellent critical talks over de Beistegui's work that also expressed admiration and envy. Unfortunately I had to leave a bit early to meet a friend, so I didn't get to hear all of de Beistegui's replies, though it's clear that we can expect great and original work from him in the future. Sadly I was unable to attend Richard Boothby's talk, whose work I deeply admire as it's one of the few engagements with Freud and Lacan that situates psychoanalysis in terms of its ontological and epistemic significance rather than simply its ethical and political significance as in the case of the critics of ideology. I was also pleased to pick up a copy of DeLanda's new book on social ontology for half the price at the book exhibit, that looks very good (I'm about halfway through it and it's all about the social in terms of networks and assemblages, resonating nicely with my obsession with slime molds a few months ago).

The trip cost an arm and a leg (apparently there's no food in D.C. that is less than $23), but I come away feeling refreshed and invigorated... Though I missed all of you a good deal. Thank you so much for your support and kind words preceding the trip.

Off I Go

Tomorrow I head to Washington D.C. for job interviews.

• Courses I'm able to teach, along with course designs... Check
• Teaching methodology and philosophy... Check
• Specific questions about their universities... Check
  
• Research program... Check
• Nice suit and tie... Check

Am I forgetting anything? Let's just hope I can get some sleep the night before so I don't go into the interviews like a zombie. Although I would be delighted to land any of these positions as the programs are terrific, it would be great to have more time for research and writing, and I would be thrilled to teach more advanced courses in my areas of expertise, it's nonetheless good to go into interviews knowing that I'm not going to starve to death if I don't get one of the positions. Apart from administrative irritations (that exist anywhere), I'm already in a very good place and will be sad to leave my great colleagues, friends, and students should I get one of the positions. The bottom line is that I love teaching above all other things (well not the grading part), and so long as I'm doing that I will be happy. At the very worst, I'll suffer some humiliation at having discussed things here. For whatever reason, my anxiety finally broke yesterday and I feel full of a fighting spirit today. With any luck that will last. At any rate, those of you who detest me, get out your voodoo dolls and needles. Those of you who have some passing fondness, wish me luck.

Jobs and the Desire of the Other

Well I just discovered that I've landed interview number 2 at one of the schools I desire to be at most. It's a well known liberal arts college that has a thriving philosophy department. Looking over my post on Ian Lustick's book, I've noticed that there's been an evolution of my thinking on this blog. There I was concerned about the possibility of breaking from systems, history, and power. Since September I've increasingly examined how networks and movements are formed, the fragility of social organization, and how history is used to create openings of possibility in the present. Perhaps I have a research orientation after all. I'm all atwitter with excitement.

My Limitless Narcissm

I'm always delighted to discover that some other blog or site has linked to me. As a means of authorizing my narcissism, I tell myself that it has roots in a deep Cartesian crisis such that I have come to recognize that the immediacy and self-certainy of the cogito can no longer be established. In establishing the certainty of the cogito, Descartes writes:

But what then am I? A thinking being. What is a thinking being? It is a being which doubts, which understands, which conceives, which affirms, which denies, which wills, which rejects, which imagines also, and which perceives. It is certainly not a trivial matter if all these things belong to my nature. But why should they not belong to it? Am I not that same person who now doubts almost everything, who nevertheless understands and conceives certain things, who is sure of and affirms the truth of this one thing alone, who denies all the others, who wills and desires to know more about them, who rejects error, who imagines many things, sometimes even against my will, and who also perceives many things, as through the medium of the senses or the organs of the body? Is there anything in all that which is not just as true as it is certain that I am and that I exist, even though I were always asleep and though the one who created me directed all his efforts to deluding me? And is there any one who these attributes which can be distinguished from my thinking or which can be said to be separable from my nature? For it is so obvious that it is I who doubt, understand, and desire, that nothing could be added to make it more evident. And I am also certainly the same one who imagines; for once more, even though it could happen that the things I imagine are not true, nevertheless this power of imagining cannot fail to be real, and it is part of my thinking. Finally I am the same being which perceives-- that is, which observes certain objects as though by means of the sense organs, because I do really see light, hear noises, feel heat. Will it be said that these appearances are false and that I am sleeping? Let it be so; yet at the very least it is certain that it seems to me that I see light, hear noises, and feel heat. (Descartes, Meditation 2)

Descartes can take solace in the fact that while he may be uncertain of the veracity of his representations, he cannot doubt his own existence. I, on the other hand, am not so lucky; for insofar as I am a subject of the signifier, I only gain evidence of my own existence in and through others who occasionally make gestures in my direction suggesting that perhaps I do exist after all.

Along these lines, I was particularly amused to discover that the political theorist Ian Lustick from University of Pennsylvania has linked to my blog, using a diary I wrote on one of his interviews to plug his book Trapped in the War on Terror. The most amusing thing about this is not the link itself, but that my little corner of the rhizophere is linked alongside Arianna Huffington's blog, dailykos, and jeffbridges.com. I never knew I was in such auspicious company. Who knows, perhaps I'll even appear someday on NPR! (shudders)

At any rate, so as to return the favor I'll plug his book again and the original diary which he apparently appreciated... Hey Lustick, need any new faculty in the Poli Sci department?

Jobs and the Desire of the Other

Well I've been fortunate enough to land at least one job interview at the American Philosophical Association conference in December. Hopefully there are more invitations to come. This isn't half bad as my research focus is contemporary French philosophy, and U.S. philosophy departments tend to have a highly allergic reaction to anything French, instead allowing language, literature, and cultural studies departments to do scholarship in this area. At any rate, this is pretty good for having only sent out eleven application packets.

Although this is happy news, I've found myself in the midsts of a massive anxiety attack, following me about for days. I tossed and turned all night, filled with anxiety and feverish thoughts as to who I am. In short, I'm wallowing in the midsts of the question of fantasy Che vuoi? "You're asking me this, but what do you really want?" That is, what is my research about? And when I ask myself this question, I am asking what it is about philosophically. In my fantasy life, things would be easy for me if I were pursuing positions in rhetoric, literary theory, cultural studies, or political theory-- it's always elswhere that things would work out for us --but explaining my work philosophically, that's far more difficult. How am I to explain the relevance of Lacan to philosophy in a non-dogmatic fashion, free of difficult jargon, that isn't simply about ideology critique a la Zizek? I feel as if I need some pithy statement of my philosophical project that resonates with more traditional philosophical questions in epistemology and ontology, but when I try to articulate such a project I suddenly feel paralyzed like a deer in the headlights. "My work is focused on differential and relational ontology." "I'm interested in the manner in which the formation of reality emerges from the impossible-real of irreducible antagonism. By the impossible-real I mean..." "I'm focused on questions of how it's possible to break with socio-historical mediation so as to articulate a truth." "I'm interested in the consequences that follow from the death of God. By the death of God I mean... Here I'm thinking primarily of the function God serves in Descartes' third meditation, and implicitly in the work of other philosophers that posit a whole..." "My work primarily revolves around the thought of Badiou, Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Ranciere, and Zizek because..." "I'm interested in the relationship between the symbolic, imaginary, and real from the perspective of how our relationship to reality is organized, and am interested in the role desire and intersubjectivity play in questions of epistemology and our relation to being..." "I'm interested in questions of emergence and self-organization such that..."

Everything that falls from my lips ends up sounding vague, empty, or in need of too much clarification... Or I worry that I end up sounding like a posterboy for the typical postmodernist. What does the Other want from me? What am I for the Other. "What is the philosophical project that defines me as a human being?" I think I'll go curl up in a ball now. Fortunately I don't need a job, so at least I have that going for me. I have terrific colleagues, am in an intellectually stimulating environment, have lots of things going on such as conferences in the work, and am generally very content here. About the biggest irritation is bs administrative things, but you find that anywhere. It's much nicer to interview when you're not facing the prospect of hunger and debtors.

Paranoid Fantasies

Being the narcissist that I am, I use a webtraffic service to monitor traffic on this site, which gives me all sorts of nifty information about how many visitors I have a day and where they are from. This provides me with some evidence that I exist, thereby supplementing the failure of Cartesian immediacy now that we know the subject is a perpetually displacing void. I'm gratified to see that the traffic on this blog has steadily increased since I began using the service two months ago, but also sometimes find myself disturbed by the websearches that led people here and, more recently, by certain repeat visitors. Don't get me wrong, repeat visitors are the true measure of any blog, but this visitor in particular has my mind awhirl with paranoid fantasies. About a month ago I wrote this post on Marx's Communist Manifesto, and ever since then I have been repeatedly visited by someone in Herndon, Virginia. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not prone to paranoid fantasies and have never gotten worked up about net deception, but this visitor is particularly interesting. You see, this visitor signs on without fail at the precise moment I sign on whenever I check my web traffic. They sign on at the precise minute I sign on. How is this possible unless they are somehow monitoring traffic to my website and perhaps my traffic in particular? Perhaps the webmap is simply recording my visits, but why would it record them in Herndon, when I'm located outside of Dallas?

Having done a little research on Herndon now, I've discovered that it is located outside of Washington, D.C. and is one of the emerging hubs of internet technology. Of course, this particular visitor doesn't seem particularly advanced technologically, as they're using Windows ME and have a monitor that measures 600 x 800 (don't worry, the webtracking service does not give me your name or personal information, nor does it give me much more information than what I've just listed). Anyway, being the self-important narcissist that I am, this odd occurance generates fantasies in my mind that I am now being watched by the government and homeland security for having written on Marx. Now, the important point isn't whether the fantasy is true (unlikely I think). This is, after all, just a fleeting thought that passes through my mind. Rather, when encountering a fantasy such as this, a fantasy of one's relation to the Other or how the Other regards you, the question to ask is what sort of desire this speaks. Returning to the theme of my name (here and here), I've sometimes wondered how the signifier "Paul" functions in my unconscious with respect to the Biblical namesake. I confess that I have a great admiration for Paul's revolutionary work in walking from one end of the world to the other, and the manner in which he was able to become nameless by being all things to all people. Wouldn't I need an oppressive empire to do such a thing? Perhaps part of the reason if find Lacanian psychoanalysis so appealing is that there's a genuine practice attached to it and a concerted effort to further its growth around the world, all of which feeds mightily into my Pauline fantasy. Moreover, is there a way in which such a dark fantasy-- a situation that could be very costly were it true --allows me some jouissance that I'm otherwise forbidden or punishes me for some jouissance that I already enjoy. When analyzing fantasy, the point is not to focus on the fantasy itself, but rather what the fantasy would render possible were it to take place. Often fantasies are extremely disturbing to those that have them and are not pleasant scenerios that make up the space of daydreams. The place to look in fantasy is not so much these masturabatory daydreams, but rather in the thoughts we have about how others are evaluating us and seeing us. Clearly there's something megalomaniacal in this fantasy, as it inflates my importance by seeing me as worthy of government scrutiny. But perhaps, were such a scenerio to occur, other things would become possible that were not formerly possible for me. Or perhaps I'm just punishing myself for not having yet responded to N.Pepperell's beautiful, challenging, and provacative recent posts (here and here). Certainly these are grounds for being sent to a secret European prison or Guantanamo Bay, and certainly such punishment would relieve me of some guilt.

I really must be mad to write these things on a blog. I hope no one is watching.

Me and My Semblable

On occasion I've been known to resemble myself, though instances of this are few and far between. This lack of resemblance started quite early in my life, as I did not know my true name until I was about nine years of age. Prior to nine I had always answered to the name of "Levi", yet around the age of nine a teacher brutally informed me that my true name is "Paul". As it turns out, I had been named after my father, "Paul Reginald Bryant". Before I was born, my uncle had visited the family graveyard with my grandfather-- this is not as pretentious as it sounds, as the family graveyard was a small plot of land in the woods on a small old farm in Virginia that they didn't even own anymore --and had seen the name of my great uncle who had died of some nasty fever very early in his childhood.

Apparently he liked the name "Levi", so before I was even born he began referring to me as such, and apparently it caught on with the entire family. There's even a black and white photograph of my mother, while pregnant, standing in the front yard with my father's ear pressed to her stomach. Both of them have enormous and silly smiles on their faces, and the caption that reads "Listening to Levi". I grew up with this picture gazing at me in the house and these days I often wonder what impact it might have had on the structuration of my unconscious. Listening to Levi... Is it a mistake that I chose a career as an educator? Is it an accident that I detest loud places such as dance bars or concerts as I am unable to hear; or, better yet, be heard? Is it a mistake that my primary jouissance consists of talking and that I often find myself bored and discontent when attending outings where there is little talk or opportunity for me to talk? Does it come as a surprise that I would later choose "talk therapy" and become captivated by Lacanian psychoanalysis, where the analyst occupies such a passive role? Might this be why I find myself most infuriated when I experience myself as not being heard-- I recall the rage I felt many months ago when Jodi Dean had not responded to a couple of my posts on her blog and the rage and dark fantasies that swirled about this silence --and that when I am heard I suddenly feel as if I lose my voice, unable to continue speaking, as if I must walk a fine line between being heard and not being heard so as to sustain my desire. There is also, of course, my obsessive participation on blogs and email lists, my inability to resist responding. On those occasions when I've contemplated having a child I've often said to myself that I would like him or her to have a name that "they could make for themselves", like Elizabeth that could be "Beth", "Liz", "Lizzie", "Ela", etc, or "Finnegan" that could be "Fin". It wasn't until recently that I recognize that "making a name for oneself" also signifies something quite different, as if I willfully did not wish to hear what I was saying or recognize my own desire.

And what of the picture itself? My father's ear is pressed against my mother's stomach. In a way this is a sort of "primal scene", a vision of myself being born through the ear of my father or of surmounting the impossibility of witnessing one's emergence into the world, thoroughly demolishing Kant's first antinomy which argues that both the claim that the world has a beginning in time and space and does not have a beginning in time and space are false. To be born of an ear and to see oneself born of an ear. And yet the fact that my name issued not from my father, but from my uncle perhaps allows me to sustain the unconscious fantasy that my father is not my father.

I am not sure whether the discovery that my name was not my name, that "Levi =/= Levi", was traumatic or not. I argued with the teacher, yet she insisted. Later, on the way home, I told my younger sister on the bus, and she was furious, convinced that I was lying. She even declared that she would "tell on me", ran into the house, and was shocked when my mother said that indeed it was true. I felt betrayed and immediately set about insisting that everyone call me "Paul". Yet in making this decision, I effaced my own name-- what's in a legal name? --and underwent an aphanisis, a fading, behind the name of my father. Where the extension of a name is = to 1 in most cases, the extension of my legal name was = to 2. Yet since 1 = 1, perhaps I confused myself with the one who had bequeathed me my name, preventing me from discerning any of my own accomplishments as my own. For instance, prior to analysis, my completed dissertation sat on a shelf for many months gathering dust, despite the fact that after I'd written it by mistake-- I originally intended it as my master's thesis, but five hundred pages popped out and my director insisted that I use it as my dissertation and write another master's thesis --and I was unable to complete the editing until I re-took my name "Levi". In retrospect I must have looked quite mad to those around me, as once again I went about insisting that I be referred to as "Levi", that I was no longer "Paul". From that point on, my intellectual production increased massively, and I no longer felt the crushing anxiety that had before accompanied my engagement on discussion lists or the writing of articles and conference papers. In short, it seems that my psychic structuration precisely mirrored that of masculine sexuation. Even today I still feel the need to crush my name-- my original name --and do things such as writing this post that humiliate that name; as if I must cede to my father that which is rightfully his and am committing an act of transgression by embracing my name.

In this regard, I wonder when work is. I phrase this question in this way purposefully. When is work? Last week I posted a diary entitled The Diacritical Production of Identity, that received a good deal of praise and interest both on this blog and in email. Rather than experiencing delight from this recognition, I instead felt rage, anger, and depression, for I had written this article for the Yahoo Lacan list in 2003, and was simply posting it here so as to get my work on Lacan in one easily locatable place. This is a rare thing for me to do. Only a handful of articles on this blog were written previously and many of my other posts receive similar recognition-- such as a post a few months ago about Deleuze and individuation or another on Lacan and sexuation --yet strangely I fixate on this post. If I experienced melancholia at the reception of this article, then this was because this reception made me feel fallen, as if I was doing genuine work in the past and was no longer capable of this sort of work. Will I ever do work again that matches the sort of work I was doing in 2003 at the height of my engagement with Lacan or when further back yet when I was writing my book? Has my mind grown thick and slow from age or my nightly glass or two of wine? Are the exingencies of life too pressing, leaving me with no leisure to think? Am I finished?

For me, it seems that work is always something I once did or always something yet to come in the future after I have finally gained intellectual mastery of theory and philosophy. It is never what I am doing now. Peas porridge hot. Peas porridge cold. Peas porridge in my bowl, five days old. I have either already done work or am yet to do work. So in this experience of work that I have done, I experience a hatred of my semblable, of that person that I once was and would like to crush and best that person, exceeding their work... I would like to resemble myself, as perhaps I have done on occasion.

Yet in experiencing my work in this way, it seems that I sustain my desire. Lacan argues that we have a desire to desire, that the aim of desire is not to satisfy desire, but to continue desiring. In obsession, the obsessional has a desire for an impossible desire... A desire that is impossible to fulfill such as seeing oneself born or being alive while being dead. In hysteria the neurotic has the desire for an unsatisfied desire so that he might continue to desire. Occasionally I overcome the idea that work will finally commence at some point in the future, only to find myself in the opposite situation of feeling that work is past. When describing the difference between desire and drive, Zizek tells the joke of a man having sex for the first time. The woman instructing him first tells him to push it in, which he eagerly obeys. She then tells him to pull it out. Again he obeys. Then in again, and so on. Finally, in a moment of exasperation, he exclaims "Make up your mind, woman! Is it to be in or out?" This subject is a subject of desire insofar as he believes that there is a final state, one action he is supposed to engage in. By contrast, the subject of drive is that subject that finds his jouissance not in one or the other state, but rather in the repetition of the idiotic action itself. Why did I use the signifier "fallen" to describe my relation to my previous work. Bruce Fink pointed out that this term has connotations of sin.

I'm Famous! or Ruminations on the Death Drive

Well I'm not sure if there's any further I can go in the rhizosphere. I have now been referenced by K-Punk in an excellent post on death drive and Melville. Check it out here. What can I say, I feel a bit like Pip from Great Expectations. Apparently my narcissism and delight at being reflected knows no bounds.

Why Can't I Enjoy?

During the semester I dream of the happy days of Winter and Summer break, where finally I'll have the time to sit down and do some sustained reading, writing, and blogging. Yet strangely, when some vacation comes along-- right now it's Thanksgiving break in the States --I find it very difficult to motivate myself to do anything, and generally fall into a dark malaise. I'll wake up late in the morning, have my coffee, and surf about the various blogs to see what's being discussed. Perhaps someone will have responded to me, yet I won't respond back as I'll worry about disappointing them (I suppose I'm still a bit glum about the article, even though another article was recently published and I have another journal breathing down my neck for an article on Zizek and Badiou), feeling as if my brain has fallen out of my ear. Suspiciously I'll look at the books sitting on the table next to me, unable to bring myself to pick them up. "I'm still waking up, I'm hungry, I should cut back the foilage in my yard, I don't feel up to concentrating." So then I'll make myself something to eat with the intention of giving myself the intention to concentrate. Yet having eaten, I then need to digest, so I'll either find myself before the television searching cable for a bad movie that perhaps I'll be able to overinterpret so as to justify my poor taste, or before the computer playing Civilization III as per the suggestion of the scary and wicked N.Pepperell, feeling stupid because I don't have the patience to evolve my kingdom much beyond the stage of monarchy. Inevitably these activities lead me to take a nap, losing yet more time with respect to doing the things I would genuinely like to be doing.

In a very nice passage from The Fragile Absolute, Zizek gives a lucid account of the objet a. Speaking in the context of Marx's account of capitalism being propelled by its own internal antagonisms, Zizek writes,

So where, precisely, did Marx go wrong with regard to surplus-value? One is tempted to search for an answer in the key Lacanian distinction between the object of desire and surplus-enjoyment as its cause. Henry Krips evokes the lovely example of the chaperone in seduction: the chaperone is an ugly elderly lady who is officially the obstacle to the direct goal-- object (the woman the suitor is courting); but precisely as such, she is the key intermediary moment that effectively makes the beloved woman desirable-- without her the whole economy of seduction would collapse. Or, take another example from a different level: the lock of curly blond hair, that fatal detail of Madeleine in Hitchcock's Vertigo. When, in the love scene in the barn towards the end of the film, Scottie passionately embraces Judy refashioned into the dead Madeleine, during their famous 360-degree kiss, he stops kissing her and withdraws just long enough to steal a look at her newly blonde hair, as if to reassure himself that the particular feature which transforms her into the object of desire is still there... Crucial here is the opposition between the vortex that threatens to engulf Scottie (the 'vertigo' of the film's title, the deadly Thing) and the blonde curl that imitates the vertigo of the Thing, but in a miniaturized, gentrified form.

This curl is the objet petit a which condenses the impossible-deadly Thing, serving as its stand-in and thus enabling us to entertain a livable relationship with it, wihtout being swallowed up by it. As Jewish children put it when they play gently aggressive games: 'Please, bite me, but not too hard...' [? I must be Jewish as I enjoy these games]. This is the difference between 'normal' sexual repression and fetishism: in 'normal' sexuality, we think that the detail-feature that serves as the cause of desire is just a secondary obstacle that prevents our direct access to the Thing-- that is, we overlook its key role; while in fetishism we simply make the cause of desire directly into our object of desire: a fetishist in Vertigo would not care about Madeleine, but simply focus his desire directly on the lock of hair; a fetishist suitor would engage directly with the chaperone and forget about the lady herself, the official goal of his endeavours.

So there is always a gap between the object of desire itself and its cause, the mediating feature or element that makes this object desirable. What happens in melancholy is that we get the object of desire deprived of its cause. For the melancholic, the object is there but what is missing is the specific intermediary feature that makes it desirable. For that reason there is always at least a trace of melancholy in every true love: in love, the object is not deprived of its cause; it is, rather, that the very distance between object and cause collapses. This, precisely, is what distinguishes love from desire: in desire, as we have just seen, cause is distinct from object; while in love, the two inexplicably coincide-- I magically love the beloved one for itself, finding in it the very point from which I find it worthy of love. (20-21)

So I suppose that I'm experiencing a bit of melancholy, having been deprived of the cause of my desire by not having teaching, grading, and committee work interfere with my writing and research. Why can't I simply enjoy these activities of research and writing without these obstacles? Why am I unable to go directly to the enjoyment? Why must my enjoyment take the form of a theft from my symbolically sanctioned duties and obligations? I shudder to think of what would happen were I ever to get a nice academic position with a 2/2 or 3/3 load.

The Enigmatic Desire of the Other

Tell me what I am, damn it! At this moment I find myself piping mad, snorting fire with anger, and more than a little depressed. Earlier this week I found out that a paper I had submitted to a journal on Deleuze was rejected for publication. Now in and of itself, this is not such an unusual thing. You submit papers to conferences and journals, some of them are accepted, some aren't. That's the way the academic machine works. I believe that it is a good paper and that it should be published, that it makes a contribution to the secondary literature, and is unlike much of what's out there, but this is the way things go. However, the fact that it was rejected is not primarily what irritates with me. Rather, it was how the paper was rejected that makes me so angry.

I sent the article to the journal two weeks ago on November 14th. Now in my experience, it is unusual to hear anything from a journal about a prospective publication for months, so this suggests to me that the article wasn't given due consideration. In fact, a lack of "due consideration" seems par for the course with the head editor of this particular journal. Insofar as I submitted the article through email as the journal specified, I was concerned when I didn't receive confirmation that the article was received, so I wrote the editor a brief email the following week just to get confirmation, never to hear back from him. Now I wonder, why would it have been so much trouble just to send a short response thanking me for the submission and informing me that it had been received? Given that electronic communications sometimes go astray, this strikes me as a perfectly reasonable thing to expect, as I would send any article I submitted by regular mail through certified mail for peace of mind. As it stands, I went about the last couple of weeks wondering if the article had been received and feeling as if I were being held hostage. Do I write again, perhaps earning the anger of the editor, while freeing myself to send the article elsewhere, or do I maintain my patience, when the letter has perhaps not reached its destination, losing valuable time that would be spent better elsewhere?

However, while all of this was minorly irritating, the real irritation came with the rejection letter. Here's what the editor wrote:

Dear Professor Bryant

Thank you very much for submitting X. Unfortunately Y is not able to use this piece at this time. I’d like to take the opportunity to thank you for your interest in Y and wish you luck in placing your essay elsewhere.

I delete the name of the article and the title of the journal for obvious reasons. Now perhaps I've dealt with extremely unusual journals in the past, but in my experience, article rejections are usually accompanied by reader reviews as to why the article was found wanting, so that the author might improve their work and understand why the article was rejected. All I'm told is that the journal cannot use the article at this time. Is this because the journal currently has enough articles for the next few issues? Is this because there's something internally wrong with the article itself? Moreover, given the quick turn around time and the time of the semester, I strongly suspect that the article didn't even make it to outside reviewers, which makes me doubly angry. In response to this, I sent out a short query as to why the article was rejected. Anything here would do-- "the article was too vague", "the article tried to cover too much", "the article doesn't fit any of the current themes we're trying to organize the journal around", "your arguments are logically invalid", and so on. Yet, just as in the case where I tried to confirm that the article had been received, I have received no response from the editor.

All of this brings me to the difference between demand and desire. Why is it that I find this situation so intolerable? Lacan often argues that the neurotic is the one who confuses demand with desire. He even goes so far as to claim that neurosis is a defense against the desire of the Other. Initially this sounds deeply mysterious, as many of us would like to be desired and thus cannot fathom why we would seek to defend against desire. However, for Lacan this is not, properly speaking, the desire of the Other. Rather, we encounter the desire of the Other not in experiencing ourselves as wanted, but precisely when we are unsure of what we are for the Other. Fink makes this point nicely in A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis,

...according to Lacan the neurotic is to a great extent stuck at a level shy of desire: at the level of demand.

Lacan formulates this by saying that, at the commencement of an analysis, the neurotic's fundamental fantasy involves the subject's stance with respect to the Other's demand, rather than with respect to the Other's desire. The subject much prefers to deal with the Other's demand that he or she do things, become this or that, than to deal with the Other's desirousness, pure and simple... The neurotic even prefers to believe that the Other wants something truly horrible-- that the Other is demanding something of him or her that is very onerous and unpleasant --to remaining uncertain as to what the Other wants.

The encounter with the Other's desire is anxiety producing. To illustrate this point, Lacan borrows an example from animal behavior-- that of the femaile preying mantis, which bites off the head of her male partner during copulation --and asks us to imagine the following hypothetical situation (admittedly not easy to put to the text experimentally). You are wearing a mask that makes you look like either a female or a male praying mantis, but you do not know which; a female praying mantis approaches, making you extremely anxious. The anxiety you feel may well be worse in the case in which you do not know whether you are disguised as a male or a female, than in the case in which you do know you are disguised as a male. (Indeed, in the latter case what you experience is simply fear of a specific fate that is soon to befall you.) Hence, you may prefer to assume or conclude that your death is nigh because you are dressed as a male, even if you are not sure this is true. If we take the female praying mantis here as the Other (the real, not the symbolic Other), you may prefer to assume the Other is out to get you-- to assume that you know what it is you are for the Other, what object you are in the Other's desire --than to remain anxiously uncertain. (60-1)

Even if the demand we experience as issuing from the Other is truly horrible, it is preferable to this anxiety. The neurotic is the one who tries to convert desire into demand as a way to ward off this anxiety provoking encounter with desire that leaves us without knowing what we truly are. It is for this reason that not everyone is capable of enduring analysis, because analysis consists in precisely such an encounter with the enigma of the Other's desire, that can be extremely unsettling. I, for instance, have had affirmative anarcho-Deleuzian vampire-desiring machines in analysis, convinced that they were schizo-machines joyously creating themselves without limit or lack, who began every session asking me what I wanted them to talk about, and who did everything they could to provoke a specific demand. This suggests to me that the subject position occupied by these analysands was that of neurosis, not psychosis, as their action was organized in relation to the Other. The analyst must take great care during the early consultations of analysis not to present this analytic desire too massively, lest the analysand quickly flee from analysis.

One might wonder why, if fantasy is a defense against the anxiety producing desire of the Other, traversing the fantasy is the aim of analysis. Unlike other clinical orientations where the therapist might be warm or supportive, analysis is not a pleasant place. It's not unusual for an analysand to have a very difficult time recalling what went on during any particular session afterwards, and I suspect that this is due both to the anxiety that analysis provokes and because acts take place in the course of analysis that reconfigure the very being of the subject... Acts that for that reason cannot be remembered. If traversing the fantasy is the aim of analysis, then this is because the demands we come to evoke from the Other are often the very source of our own suffering. This, for instance, can be readily seen in the fantasy that one is a piece of shit for the Other, a bit of waste to be quickly gotten rid of. Yes, this fantasy helps to manage anxiety, but at the level of the analysand's action is produces all sorts of other forms of suffering as he manuevers to get himself turned into a piece of shit so he might be flushed. An encounter with the enigma of the Other's desire allows for the reconfiguration of this space of fantasy, for a bit more openness as to what the Other might truly be demanding (something that can never be known anyway).

So long as I don't know what the Other demands, I am unable to effectively respond to the Other or interact with the Other. It is for this reason that fantasy intervenes with respect to the desire of the Other. Fantasy gives me an answer to the question of what the Other desires, and therefore allows me to act with regard to the Other. Even if the fantasy is truly awful, involving the worse sorts of abuses, insults, degradations, and horrors, these abuses are nonetheless preferable as they are specific demands that I can respond to either by seeking to destroy the Other who I believe to want these things, by fleeing, by attacking, or by submitting myself to these demands after the fashion of Justine in Sade. What I am unable to tolerate is not knowing. Likewise, we can see how fantasy might function in a similar way in larger social interactions between different groups, such as U.S. attitudes towards the Middle East or Europeans, or fundamentalist Christian attitudes towards homosexuals (I'm still perplexed as to how sex became a central focus of morality in the U.S.).

This morning I awoke to find myself in such an unpleasant space of fantasy with regard to the editor of this journal. In his silence, his non-response, I find myself forcibly confronted with the enigma of the Other's desire and the question of what I am for the Other. Am I a piece of shit? Is my work worthless? Was he being genuine when he said the journal couldn't use my article at this time, and when he wished me good luck? Did I perhaps anger this person in the past somehow without knowing it? Perhaps he's read my review of Hallward's book here and has decided to write me off as an enemy. Or perhaps I said something unflattering in the past about something he'd written. Perhaps, because a good deal of my other work revolves around Lacan, Badiou, Zizek, and even Hegel in addition to Deleuze, I'm coded as an enemy, as one not to be trusted, as these figures are generally seen as enemies of Deleuze. My mind casts about for all sorts of answers to the enigma of this desire, to the mystery of this rejection and fantasizes certain ways in which I might respond to it. Perhaps I could write him an angry letter, decrying the lack of professionalism and how unethical this sort of behavior is. Or perhaps I entertain the fantasy that this post will be read by him and provoke a certain response. Maybe it would even provoke a bit of guilt in him. Ideally I should just shake my head in wonder, walk away, take another look at the paper, and send it elsewhere. Better yet, I shouldn't rely on the Other at all to take pride in my work... After all, I can't do the work of any Other. I can only do the work that I can do.

More Love Letters From Spurious

Just yesterday I had been thinking to myself with shame that too often I write about myself, and then I read this from Spurious:

I am strongly drawn to programmatic notes, to prefaces and statements of methods in works of philosophy, or, especially, those moment in which a text draws attention to itself, and meditates upon the conditions of its own appearance. What status has a written text of philosophy that would condemn writing? Derrida, of course, has explored this question with great brilliance.

For my part, I ask the question more stupidly, but still as insistently. Or should I say the question returns in me, or that I am sometimes very little other than the place in which it returns? And I admit, too, that I am drawn to those moments when texts that are otherwise theoretical become autobiographical - that refer, in an example, to the room in which they are writing, or to the circumstances of composition.

I detest the way I creep into my writing, the way I tell little anecdotes about myself. I detest that I both derive narcissistic satisfaction from these anecdotes and humiliation at one and the same time. I suspect that I'm trying to humiliate myself somehow. Sometimes I fantasize about deleting this blog, erasing it all, and ceasing to write all together. "Adios Folks! It's been fun!" I feel as if I stick to myself, as if I am unable to get rid of myself. Gum on the heel of a shoe. My favorite philosophical works: Plato's Parmenides and Sophist, Spinoza's Ethics, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel's Science of Logic, Husserl's Logical Investigations and Cartesian Meditations, Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, and Badiou's Being and Event. With the exception of Deleuze, these are all works that acheive a sublime formalism and absence of voice... An absence of idiosyncracy. They are populated by what Hegel called "notions" pushing themselves about without ties to a concrete situational event... How is it that I aspire to this anonymity given what I have to say about the nature of individuation? Perhaps I refer to Spurious' meditations as love letters as they allow me to love a little bit of that scrap or remainder that I'm always trying to eradicate... That stench of self.