From: "Lydia Perovich" <fauxprophete-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Zizek on Deleuze [time]
Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 10:54:52 -0400


Geof,

What I found most intriguing in Zizek’s employment of temporality in 
*Ticklish Subject*, Geof, is his futur-antérieur, the will-have-been 
ontology. Not unlike Badiou, Zizek shows that time actually unfolds 
backwards – the Event post-facto establishes its past Truth, novelty 
inscribes a brand new past, it is always one step forward, two steps back 
the way of the movement.

Although, Zizek sez, Plato was the first one to try to approach the 
“not-yet-symbolized texture of relations” in Timaeus (where it appears as 
chora), Kant was the one who stated the question with utmost precision. If 
the ‘world’ is not something that inertly awaits for the subject’s gaze 
‘outside’ but is constituted through subject’s transcendental scheme, what 
is it that precedes the transcendentally constituted reality? Along comes 
Hegel who transposes Kantian epistemological limitation into ontological 
fault. Instead of going along with the ‘Copernican turn’ and maintaining 
that conditions of possibility of human knowledge determine the object of 
that knowledge, Hegel interprets the limitations of our knowledge as 
“simultaneously the limitation of the very object of our knowledge, that is, 
the gaps and voids in our knowledge of reality are simultaneously the gaps 
and voids in the ‘real’ ontological edifice itself.”

The inconsistencies of knowledge do not prevent us from getting to know 
‘reality’ – moreover,
“there is ‘reality’ (in the most usual sense of ‘hard external reality’ as 
opposed to ‘mere notions’) only in so far as the domain of the Notion is 
alienated from itself, split, traversed by some radical deadlock, caught in 
some debilitating inconsistency.”

The ultimate fantasy that we should be aware of, Zizek adds, is the one 
behind the attempts to bridge the gap and interpret the Real as another, 
deeper, more distant instance of ‘reality’. Real is, and I am happily 
introducing Joan Copjec at this point, this out-of-joint-ness of the 
Symbolic, what “forces the signifier to turn around on itself”, “a kind of 
active retardation of its own power” (JC: Imagine There’s No Woman) – the 
lateness of the symbolic.  That is why ‘reality’ comes into being in the 
first place – as a by-produced ‘stable outside’ of the language troubled by 
circularity and lack of literalness.

This is what Zizek calls the “fundamental feature of dialectical-materialist 
ontology” – this DELAY “which forever separates an event ‘in Itself’ from 
its symbolic inscription/registration”. He gives examples from quantum 
physics and chaos theory, as well as the old Hollywood and its ‘double take’ 
situations.  While reading this I remembered also the old Loony Tunes 
cartoons in which somebody chasing somebody else suddenly finds himself 
beyond the edge of the precipice and just stays there staring blankly for a 
moment until he ‘registers’ what happened – which is followed by the 
immediate fall...

For Joan Copjec this dislocation in the order of historical being is what 
ultimately guarantees good old fashion freedom – “It is only insofar as he 
is held within the internal limit of power, the minimal gap that divides 
power from itself, that the subject is able to free himself from submission 
to the forceful pull of his own determined and determinate identity.”  She 
also connects this idea with Deleuze's virtual.

Back to Deleuze,then,

L

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