From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: Zizek Virtual/Actual and empirical
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 22:11:35 -0600


Geof wrote:

This brings me to my question:  What is the role of Time in Zizek's
work?  I 
understand that films like Hitchcock's are used to illustrate aspects of

desire, but has he worked out an ontology like, say, Heidegger?  What
role does 
time play in Lacanian psychoanalysis?  I don't know...maybe it's not a
useful 
line of flight...

Geof,

One of the things Zizek talks about in the puppet and the dwarf in
relation to time concerns the event. He is fond of quoting (as he has
previously) Rosa Luxemburg's injunction that if we wait until the right
moment to start a revolution, the moment will never come.  It is only
through premature attempts and their failure that the subjective
conditions for the right moment are created. In this sense,
predestination overlaps with real responsibility. As Zizek says:

"the real hard work awaits us the morning after, once the revolutionary
explosion is over, and we are confronted with the task of translating
this explosion into a New Order of Things, of drawing the consequences
from it, of remaining faithful to it. In other words, the truly
difficult work is not that of silent preparation, of creating the
conditions for the Event of the revolutionary explosion; the earnest
work begins after the Event; when we ascertain 'it is accomplished.'

Zizek tends to side with those interpreters who argue that Jesus and
Christianity present us in the most radical sense with a 'realized
eschatology'; one perhaps most memorably phrased in the Gospel of
Thomas:

"For the kingdom is here and yet men do not perceive it."

For Zizek this is the central difference between Christianity and
Judaism with regard to the understanding of time.  To quote Zizek once
more;

"Here I am tempted to refer to the Hegelian-Marxist opposition of formal
and material subsumption: through the Event (of Christ) we are formally
redeemed, subsumed under Redemption, and we have to engage in the
difficult work of actualizing it. The true Openness is not that of
undecidability, but that of living in the aftermath of the Event, of
drawing out the consequences - of what? Precisely of the new space
opened up by the Event."

eric



          






Quoting steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk:

> more notes -
> 
> Virtual and the Actual: a few notes on the first pages…
> 
> One of the most directly engaging areas of Deleuze’s work is on the
Virtual
> and the Actual, a pairing that has been given a more concrete
relationship
> to the real in the work of Pierre Levy. In whose work the contemporary
> (should I say postmodern) relationship of the pairing is applied,
relating
> the Virtual/Actual back into the technosphere in which we exist. In
other
> words what Levy does in maintaining the radical use of the Deleuzian
pairing
> is precisely to relate the Virtual back onto Reality. This move
maintains
> and furthers the radical investigation of the technosphere through the
use
> of the Virtual/Actual pairing. But this is not what Zizek begins to do
> rather he closes down the scientific and technological aspects and
instead
> emphasizes the “ reality of the Virtual as such, for its real effects
and
> consequences…” Approaching the Virtual through the use of mathematical
> topology and strange attractors, the immediacy of the virtual point
within
> the topological structure is that the virtual point towards which the
“lines
> and points tend” is obviously nothing. But within this topology
structure
> the Virtual is the Real of the structure because of its being the
Virtual
> point around which all the other entities circulate. Zizek suggests
that the
> “Virtual is ultimately Symbolic” (referring of course to the
centrality of
> the psychoanalytical model). But this is problematic in that the
sleight of
> intellectual hand has in it’s discarding of the technological Virtual
> Reality, indeed of the technosphere itself, discarding Levy’s
realisation
> that VR is precisely an aspect of the Deleuzian Virtual struggling
into
> existence, into actuality. For example read the technology through the
> following: where what is being suggested is that where actuality
"implies
> the production of new qualities a transformation of ideas, a true
becoming
> that feeds the virtual in turn". The virtual is perhaps then best
understood
> as "the knot of tendencies or forces that accompanies a situation,
event,
> object, or entity, and which invokes a process of resolution:
> actualization." (This is radically different from the false concept
that VR
> has in the Zizek quote where he talks of VR as a miserable imitation
of
> reality, a status which he does not give to his own favorite art form
> ‘cinema’) In place of the abstraction of the two Deleuze/Levy quotes -
Zizek
> engages in a brief trundle locating the Virtual and the Actual in the
frame
> of the human through quantum physics, but unless someone corrects me I
don’t
> believe that the understanding of the ‘quantum’ is correct (beside
there is
> no Cat…). But of course the subjectivism implicit in the
representation of
> the human pinned down in the ‘Virtual and the Actual’ is obvious and
yet
> (human).
> 
> Eric is keen on Deleuze’s ‘transcendtal empiricism’ and is better
suited to
> comment on Zizek’s partial representation of Deleuze’s empiricism -
whereas
> personally I prefer the later constructivism or the earlier references
to
> Hume. (I have a distrust of the word transcendental that occasionally
> borders on the pathological…need analysis.)  However Zizek slides over
the
> three empiricisms and does not appear to address the similarities,
> interconnections and differences between them. But the quote “Deleuze
> defines the field of Transcendental Empiricism as a ‘pure a-subjective
> current of consciousness, an impersonal prereflexive consciousness, a
> qualitative duration of  consciousness without self…” is worth
repeating
> simply because of the way it appears to slide in and around the
Deleuzian
> Virtual. (I would myself have preferred Zizek to address the
empiricism in
> greater detail rather than talking about one of Altman’s worst movies,
the
> recruiting poster material and does anyone care about the misreading
of
> Atwood text in this context ?). Isn’t it the case that he is avoiding
the
> complexity – skimming over the issue as we commonly in emails rather
than
> unpacking and interrogating in a concrete fashion precisely why
Deleuze had
> such a strong relationship to the empirical ?
> 
> Enough – becoming later I think.  Note the thinness of the coverage -
the
> seting up of the Deleuze text for its rereading through the Hegalian
> structure that awaits us  20 pages or so into the book...
> 
> regards
> steve
> 
> 
> 
> 



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