Heidegger, Being and TIme Part 1

Re(a)d 122 pages of Being and Time, first impression that I got from this book is that it reminded me of an article that I read a few months back about a distinction between Heidegger and Lacan. I don't recall but it was something that explains the main thesis of both thinkers, and that Heidegger's main thesis is "the Being of Beings". Throughout 122 pages, if I read it correctly Heidegger is going for the completion of the Being of Beings in this work. What I find it interesting is that Being in itself is never complete; it always needs some Things in order to acknowledge its Being. Thus, to talk about ontology in and by itself is unacceptable and philosophically flawed construction. Heidegger knows it phenomenologically that it is the case, therefore, he carefully avoids defining Being and creates his jargon to make his case.
So far, his distinction between ontic and ontology is very important in understanding the main thematic of his work. I think that it is necessary to write all that because it is a philosophical treatise but it is not necessary to write it here. I didn't know the book is so clearly written, and that he very well explained his contours as to how Being is strictly insurmountable to be itself by itself; it is inevitable that it needs ontical to define its Being, thus it makes up a word Being-in-the-world. So, in a sense, Heidegger is correct that Being has already always de-centered in its essence, thus construction of tying together Being and its externalities is a superb move.

Lacan and Heidegger (and the Pre-Socratics and Plato) by Badiou

It is ... certain that, for Lacan as for Heidegger, something has been forgotten or lost between the Pro-Socratics and Plato. It is not, however, the meaning of being. It is, rather, the meaning of non-relation, of the first separation or gap. Indeed, what has been lost is thought's recognition of the difference between the sexes as such.

One could also say that between the Pre-Socratics and Plato, a change takes place in the way difference is thought. This is fundamental for Lacan, since the signifier is constituted by difference. Empedocles and Heraclitus posit that, in the thing itself, identity is saturated by difference. Plato could be said to have lost sight of this line of argument, since he removed the possibility of identifying difference within the identy of the Idea.

12pg Lacan- Silent Partners

Lacanian reading of Nietzsche's two concepts of God

"This difference, often defined in terms of the difference between God as “big Other” and the personal God of faith, should not be accepted too readily as the difference between the Symbolic and the Real. One could, rather, argue that this distinction is inherent to the Symbolic as such. On the one hand, God appears as the logical/grammatical God, as the synonym of the symbolic order (and of its orderliness), namely, as the structure of the world/universe/language. On the other, “God” appears as the “Real” of this very symbolic order, as its “light,” the point of its generative power, of its productivity, of its excess. This, for instance, is the difference between the God of Newton and the God of Pascal. The first is the God of orderly regularity, the God that coincides with the very structure/organization of the universe or nature4—in short,the God of the theologians, philosophers, and scientists. The second is the God of excess, but—and this point is crucial—an excess of the Symbolic itself. Herein lies the substance of Pascal’s deservedly famous insistence upon the purely symbolic ritual as the generator of (the most intimate) faith (“Kneel down, pray, keep repeating the words, and the faith will come . . .”). God as the “excess of life,” or simply as the presence of life, is inherent to the Symbolic.“God” is the name through which a personal and singular experience of the “excess of life” is engaged at the level of the universal (for instance, in the Christian community)".



Citation

The Shortest Shadow - Alenka Zupancic

Beyond Good and Evil, Kierkegaard, More, Christ, and Capitalism

To refer to Kierkegaard's terms, Evil is Good itself "in the mode of becoming": it "becomes" as a radical disruption of the life-circuit; the difference between Good and Evil concerns a purely formal conversion from the mode of "becoming" into the mode of "being." This is how "only the spear that smote you can heal the wound": the wound is healed when the place of Evil is filled out by a "good" content. Good qua "the mask of the Thing (i.e., of radical Evil)" (Lacan) is thus an ontologically secondary, supplementary attempt to reestablish the lost balance; its ultimate paradigm in the social sphere is the corporatist endeavor to (re)construct society as a harmonious, organic, non-antagonistic edifice.

Suffice it to recall Thomas More, the Catholic saint who resisted the pressure of Henry VIII to approve of his divorce. It is easy for us today to eulogize him as a "man for all seasons," to admire his inexorable sense of rectitude, his perseverance in his convictions although the price to be paid for it was his life. What is far more difficult to imagine is the way his stubborn perseverance must have struck the majority of his contemporaries: from a "communitarian" point of view, his rectitude was an "irrational" self-destructive gesture which was "evil" in the sense that it cut into the texture of the social body, threatening the stability of the crown and thereby of the entire social order, So, although the motivations of Thomas More was undoubtedly "good," the very formal structure of his act was "radically evil": he was an act of radical defiance which disregarded the Good of community. And was it not the same with Christ himself, whose activity was experienced by the traditional Hebrew community as destructive of the very foundations of their life? Did he not come "to divide, not to unite," to set son against father, brother against brother?

We can see not, how "substance becomes subject" by way of passing into its predicates. [...] capitalism is Evil, disruptive, it unsettles the delicate balance of the closed precapitalist economy--why, precisely? Because it presents a case of a "predicate"--a secondary, subordinated moment of the social totality (money--which, in a kind of hubris, "runs amok" and elevates itself into an End-in-itself. However, once capitalism achieves a new balance of its self-reproductive circuit and becomes its own mediating totality,i.e., once it establishes itself as a system which "posits its own presuppositions," the site of "Evil" is radically displaced: what now counts as "evil" are precisely the left-overs of the previous "Good" -- islands of resistance of precapitalism which disturb the untroubled circulation of Capital, the new form of Good.


Cited

Tarrying with the Negative, pg 97-98, Slavoj Žižek

Lacanian Drive

We need to shift from formal accounts of the built environment to look at the question of how it is experienced. Hence subjectivity…

Lacan’s diagram of the drives traces what we might call a desire line. It alludes to the essential spatiality of desire. It might as well describe our affective relations to the city. Imagine tracing a line across your lover’s breast, and then repeating that on the city. Desire leaps the gap between the subjective world and objects. Our objects are not simply given to us, they are shaped by our signifiers, they are always symbolic objects. Look at the landscape of the body, how we differentiate it into objects. So too the city. [Otherwise a breast is a breast is a breast, a butcher’s cartography, no more no less.]

The drive is always a return journey, so says Lacan. The line circumvents the object (the ‘a’) and returns to the circle (the rim). My signifiers always circumvent what I desire, I am never in possession of it. [The lesson of Midas is that we never get what we desire or else we die; we go on desiring until we die.]

The rim is a place. It represents the site for my desire, even though my desire is always elsewhere. We make places by returning to them. I foray into the abyss in pursuit of my objects, and return safely to a place. Architecture is always involved in this dialogue between the foray out (abyss, danger), the return (safety, place). Spaces become places when we return to them. Hence the essentially recursive nature of place. It is a mistake to think that you might return without a ticket. Return engages all the mechanisms of remembering and reflecting and representing. Déjà vu (a new place that seems as if we have visited it before) and its twin sister derealisation (a place we visited before that seems as if it were new) are simply disruptions in the formation of place.

For Lacan’s diagram, cf. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis; for déjà vu cf. Freud, ‘The uncanny’; for derealisation cf. Freud, ‘A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis’.

Schreber('s) Case

Schreber was a successful and highly respected judge until middle age when the onset of his psychosis occurred. He woke up one morning with the thought that he was a transvestite, and the lover of God. They copulated through the nerves, which rose to the sky, went through the clouds, to meet the descending divine rays... He writes in his Mémoires, "Few people have been brought up according to such strict moral principles as I... but as soon as I am alone with God, if I may so express myself, I must continually or at least at certain times, strive to give divine rays the impression of a woman in the height of sexual delight; to achieve this I have to employ all possible means, and have to strain all my intellectual powers and foremost my imagination..."

Says Lacan, I quote: "the term which I translate as Nerve-annexation, and which comes from these messages illustrates this remark insofar as passion and action between these beings are reduced to those annexed or disannexed nerves, but also insofar as these nerves, just like the divine rays with which they are homogeneous, are nothing but the identification of the spoken words they bear: which the voices formulate as, "Do not forget that the nature of the rays is that they must speak."

http://www.lacan.com/issue34.php

In relation to Alethosphere/Mass Media

Just as a quick note, here’s a quote from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis that relates to Lacan’s discussion of the “alethoshpere” on page 161 of The Other Side…:

Perhaps the features that appear in our time so strikingly in the form of what are more or less correctly called the mass media, perhaps out very relation to the science that ever increasingly invades our field, perhaps all this is illuminated by the reference to those two objects, whose place I have indicated for you in a fundamental tetrad – namely, the voice – partly planeterized, even stratosphereized, by our machinery – and the gaze, whose ever-encroaching character is no less suggestive, for, by so many spectacles, so many phantasies, it is not so much our vision that is solicited, as our gaze that is aroused (Lacan, 1998, 274).