File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0312, message 1


From: "Lydia Perovich" <fauxprophete-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: [Zizek on Singer, over and out]
Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2003 10:03:26 -0400


Since we're at Zizek, here's one citation just for Steve -- and as a 
conclusion to the Singer episode (there's not much more to be said of 
Singer, Steve-o).

In his and Mladen Dolar's lovely book on opera *Opera's Second Death* 
(Routledge, 2002), Zizek has a few pages on Singer.  He first calls him a 
likely "today's equivalent of de Sade", goes on to describe some of his 
utilitarian ethics and for some unclear reason considers him a person who 
happily follows what Zizek calls the "contemporary posmodern ethics" to 
their absurd end.  (This line of argument is really mangled, in the worst 
possible Zizekian mode.)  But soon enough Zizek's Dr. Jekyll face comes out 
in the concluding passages of this segment:

"One of the divisions in the chapter on *Vernunft* in Hegel's 
*Phaenomenologie des Geistes* speaks about "das geistige Tierreich": the 
social world that lacks any spiritual substance so that individuals 
effectively interact as intelligent animals within it. They use reason but 
only to assert their individual interests, to manipulate others into serving 
their own pleasures. Is not a world in which the highest rights are human 
rights precisely such a "spiritual animal kingdom"?  There is, however, a 
price to be paid for such liberation -- in such a universe, human rights 
ultimately function as *animal* rights. This, then, is the ultimate truth of 
Singer, but the obvious counterargument to this is, so what, why should we 
not reduce humankind to its proper place, that of one of the animal 
species?"

"What gets lost in this reduction? The thing, something to which we are 
unconditionally attached regardless of its positive qualities. In Singer's 
universe, there is a place for mad cows but no place for an Indial sacred 
cow. Singer's universe is the positive universe of qualities in which there 
is no place for what Kant would have called the eruption of the noumenal 
dimension in the order of phenomenal reality, no place for the dimension 
beyond the pleasure principle, no place for *love* in the radical sense of 
the term."  (pp. 143-144)

L

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