Badiou [Plato] Zizek [Aristotle]?

It is something of a cliche posed into a question and framed by Raphael's fresco "The Academy" in which you have two figures posed against each other. There is Plato whose figure points skyward that represents the grounding of all things in the Ideal and eternal Truth that grounds beings. Then, there is the other pole figured in Aristotle who points in the opposite direction--toward the Earth: the truth, on these terms, happens in the action of being in the midst of beings.

These two figures at the origins of western philospohy become for us two sides that stress a point--a metaphysical point that grounds all things. There is first the eternal transcendent ideal into which all things exist only by their participation in the Ideal that animates and forms the thing as such. And there is, in the second place, the practical world--the empirical world--a world of existent power animated by different degress of being, and different natures and potiencies.

This dualism posed between the Mind and the Aesthetic becomes the divide that splits western philosophy only to be united by Kant (albeit insufficiently) and finally by Hegel.

Today we have two dominate philosophers thinking for the world today: Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. Both are indebted to Hegel, but in different and unique ways. For Badiou the challenge that Hegel poses to us is three-fold:

1- The only truth is that of the Whole
2- The Whole is a self-unfolding, and not an absolute-unity external to the subject.
3- The Whole is the immanent arrival of its own concept (Alain Badiou _Theoretical Writings_, page, 222).

In a strange twist, Badiou (while remaining more or less faithful to the over-arching Hegelian structure) actually addresses the challenge that Hegel poses by making an anti-Platonic move. For in the midst of Hegel's unfolding logic of becoming through the other (by, as it were, swallowing up the 'other') and thereby overcoming the limits of being in becoming, Badiou perceives something of a problem. This problem is identified in Hegel opening lines in _Science of Logic_ entitled "The World of Appearance and the World-in-Itself". Here is the exact passage:

The existent world tranquilly raises itself to the realm of laws; the null content of its varied being-there has its subsistence in an OTHER; its subsistence is therefore its dissolution. But in this other the phenomenal alos coincides with itself; thus the phenomenon in its changing is also an enduring, and its positedness is law. (_Theoretical Writings_ page, 231).

What exactly is the problem that Badiou perceives? It is a Platonic problem (or more precisely, a logic). For Hegel (appealing to a Neo-Kantian move) employs the notion of 'the phenomenal world' as a way to 'lift itself up' beyond itself to, and here is Badiou's words "any realm whatsoever" (_Theoretical Writings, page 231). Badiou identifies something of a Platonic (Neo-Kantian) move that allows for a process that unfolds via: 1- dissolution via negating the 'other'; and 2- through the phenomenal world; only to 3- re-appear back as something existing with/against itself. The Platonic move is the USE of the phenomenal world in order to transcend it through itself (i.e. the negation of the other etc.). Against this Badiou re-adjusts Hegel by asserting that "there [is] no separate subsistence that would represent its negative effectuation. Existence only results from the contingent logic of a world that nothing sublates, and in which, in the guise of the reverse, negation appears as pure exteriority" (Badiou, _Theoretical Writings_ page, 231).

It is with this decisive move that Badiou breaks with Hegel's so-called "totalitarian" logic that consumes all otherness via itself as infinite becoming. By contrast, Badiou is not confident in Hegel's belief that there is a realm called the phenomenal through which otherness is sublated and returned again (only to be sublated again). What then is Badiou's contra-Hegel move resting on, or assuming? It is, I think, assuming that the world's Appearing is itself a non-necessary logic of radical contingency. Further, because it is radically contingent and open, the world does not possess within itself an anti-sublational drive. Thus, Badiou's conclusion is that negation is not the kernel core of the world's unfolding toward the Absolute as pure transcendence. What takes place here on Badiou's line, is that the world's truth unfolds through a pure immanent truth (immanent only to itself) and does not rely on the "externalizing" truth of negation via the phenomenal world.

This move does strike us on the face of it as counter-intuitive only insofar as Badiou considers himself to be part of the Platonic heritage.



For Zizek, who is, on the face of it, a thinker devoted to the pure form of the phenomenal world (content really has emptied itself out into a pure form). In this sense, Zizek can clearly be put over with Aristotle. Yet, in a strange reversal Zizek's connections (Soviet Communism & Tom and Jerry Cartoons, between Lacan and Jesus) can only be made by employing a logic of the Platonic 'leap' (ok so it's more like a Kierkegaardian leap).

Thus, and in conclusion, on the surface of it all, Zizek seems to clearly side with Aristotle, whereas Badiou is with Plato. But when you crack open the surface, what we see happening below the surface of thoughts pure form is that Zizek is really with Plato and Badiou is really with Aristotle.

Zizek on Sex and Superego

Here is a video clip taken of Slavoj Zizek discussing the logic of Superego and its relation to sexuality with Professors Mario D'Amato and Creston Davis. This video was taken in Professor D'Amato's car (that not surprisingly overheated soon after this conversation) while driving through Orlando, Florida in search for an ipod and a Barnes and Ignoble store.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MwmDPimvGU

Christian Love takes out the Ethics of the Neighbor

Is not Christianity really about the total unreserved break-out through the shock of the external encounter? Christianity posits the radical idea that one cannot surpass the monster "other" that gazes at you with the eye of God himself. It is a logic that must withstand the weight and burden of God's gaze (within which one's subjectivity is constituted) on you through the Neighbor. Thus, to love your neighbor is to love God. But here the notion of Love itself is called into question, because if Christianity surpasses the Jewish Law (without totally sublating it) in Love (via Christ etc.) then, at bottom, one secretly overcodes and tames the "otherness" of God, the Neighbor and even the abyss of oneself (and the Law etc.) such that true encounter of otherness is no longer even necessary. And this returns us back to God's gaze that determines us, because with Love as the center mediating point of all things, then the Gaze can only now appear to one as unthreatening to one's own being. So, and here is the paradox--with Love the neighbor disappears along with God.

To keep love we must therefore have a version of love that is always linked to the law such that the surpassing of the latter via love is only possible once love vanishes from the world forever.

The neighbor only is if love is checked by the law--the law as the external encounter beyond the reach of even love itself.

Zizek visits Rollins College

Last week my friend, Slavoj Zizek headed to the warm south to visit Rollins College. He was a guest in my Christianity class and lectured on Michelangelo's drawing "Christ on the Cross" in the Cornell Fine Arts Museum. Even tho this was a closed session somehow over a 100 folks showed. His talk focused on the tension that appears between the face (submissive toward the Father) and the right hand (which is showing a sign of contempt toward the Father). This tension gave Slavoj all he needed to go off on his dialectical twists and meditations on the internal division that was introduced within the trinity--the death of Christ becomes the appearing of the unfathomable void that founds subjective freedom via the Holy Spirit. For only within the Holy Spirit can one's individuated singularity appear--and this beomces the imago dei for Zizek. This image, moreover, births a process of simulacrum whereby human beings are deficient copies of divinity (finite substance vs. infinite substance) and being deficient actually turns God himself from a transcendent "removed" substance beyond being into an abyss beyond all properties, that is, a person. Thus, God is not only an essential substance, but also a person (in the subjective sense).

This division allows us to situate the difference between "the God of the philosophers" (i.e. a God of primordial simplicity of the Cause (Aristotle)), and the Trinitarian God that is an unfathomable mystery--the void as such. The void is the dialectical synthesis that sublates both the face and the hand of Christ--it is that which both gives the ground for both obedience and for disobedience--for the positive and the negative that only resoles itself in the spiritual substance of the religious community that is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit thus becomes something like an Alien substance in science fiction (think of the Terminator). This substance cannot be stopped--it may slow down, but finally, it keeps on moving, unfolding and releasing being through itself.

In the final analysis Zizek's view of the Incarnation is indebted to an Ariusian logic whereby the Son's divinity is compromised finally by death--and this, by extension compromises the Father's transcendence such that everything finally empties itself out of the transcendent God-Father and God-Son relation into the spiritual substance of the Holy Spirit. Here Slavoj follows Hegel and Derrida's student and admirable philosoher in her own right, Catherine Malabou.

What we start to envision is a debate afoot that returns us to the founding of Christianity dogma itself: the debate between Arius (Zizek) and Athanasius (Milbank). Will the founding plenitude that keeps exceeding itself beyond substance as such be locatable within Trinitarian relations or is this movement only situated within the immanent horizon of desire organized in the spiritual substance of the Holy Spirit sundered from the father and the son (who have decomposed into the Holy Spirit) the Church.

On Tuesday night, Slavoj lectured to the public on the Neighbor, which is the founding exception of the universal (in a nice Kantian twist). Instead of ethics being founded on a generic universality subtracted from the situation, for Zizek, the universal is itself founded on the abyss of the "undead" Neighbor. The terror of the Other (as totally other) is that on which a true universal ethic works, which gives us a marked relief from Levinas' "face of the other" that secretly hides one's own unchallenged subjective truth. For Levinas, the other always rests on the assumption that the subject must first pick which "other" will appear to them as transcendent. So, Levinas' "transcendent" Other is really a hidden Feuerbachian anthropology that is projected from the Ego into "otherness" without knowing it. By contrast Zizek's other is the horror of the Other that rocks one's subjective 'center-point' off kilter and introduces into the symbolic order something external to itself (as the Real). The Other for Zizek is Other beyond symbolic domesticity. It is interesting to note that both Milbank and Zizek are critical of Levinas in the same way. But their respective "other" (or otherness that resist the status quo etc.) appears in the world differently, very differently. For Milbank the other remains beyond a reductive logic of anxiety that must put the terror of otherness into a domesticated middle-class space. The other transcendes subjectivity and for Milbank, in a radical move, actually found subjectivity as such in the middle between a self-exceeding movement beyond the coagulation of substance (in the pre-Hegelian sense). Milbank's "other" and Zizek "other" are in a way similar: They each resist symbolization or nihilistic domesticity. John's other gives us a way to resist the logic of capitalism (which is more like Levinas's view of otherness that really is constitutive upon subjective choice, that is, pure ideological fantasy!). Why, because there is something that is finally beyond the univocal logic of capitalism that is not what it is--the unknown-unknown! And this is where Zizek's other too relates to John's. They both, in the end of it all, enspouse a logic of the Real beyond substance. In a strange way then, John's "content" too has finally emptied itself into "form" like Slavoj's.

This lecture attracted about 500 folks at Rollins.