Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 16:06:58 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Zizek on Deleuze [time]


Lydia

Zizek more or less repeats you explanation below n the brief early 
disciussion on deleuze/guattari on Becoming and Philosophical Time 
quoting from 'What is philosophy' ("Philosophical time is thus a 
grandiose time of coexistence that does not exclude the beofr and after 
but superimposes them in a stratigraphic order..It is an infinite 
becoming of philosophy that crosscuts its history without being confused 
with it...." The gesture that Zizek is interested in is the way in which 
becoming (he calls it transcendental becoming) has inscribed in it 'the 
order of positive being'. ( This goes onto re-reference, repeat the 
Schelling work both from The Individable remainder and the references 
you make below including the Hegel one.) What is being engaged in is the 
argument about time as we experience it and time as opposed to the flow 
of things within time (like Storm Jameson's mostly forgotton novel 'The 
river of time' in which eternity is entropic whilst time is not...) The 
new emerges when a 'work overcomes its historical context', within 
deleuze he argues the process of becoming is 'transcendence' and results 
from an 'event' but not necessarily, i think, a truth event, after all 
where Zizek points out that the truly new is a shift in perspective 
which allows the old to be seen in a new light.

Where this seemingly breaks down is in the way that Deleuze in his use 
of becoming rather than being is not someone who accepts the Lacanian 
model of the symbolic/real that Zizek's anti-philosophy requires. Can 
you re-impose the structure on the deleuze work withou losing more than 
you gain ? seems an appropriate question.

steve

Lydia Perovich wrote:

> 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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