Lisa Neighbour - I'll See You 2008 engraved knife blade
Just kidding, I'm not dead. But Sally has a bad cold.
At Lisa's opening we discussed our ideal last words. I want to have sent, posthuminously, an email that reads: "I'm dead, you're not". Lisa has promised a blade version in that eventuality, though I prefer to think of myself as exempt . (and at that moment I might just end up saying shitfuckdamncocksucker)
Lisa's show was great! I had a similar highly intellectual conversation at the opening with my colleague Rev. Earl Chunx. The Rev. decided his last words would be 'It should have been you.' I chose the more pathetic 'why me?!'
AAAAAAWWWWWWW!
You two were made for each other.
Excerpts from: Slavoj Zizek, "The Ticklish Subject"
In short, the Lacanian answer to the question asked by such different philosophers as Althusser, Derrida and Badiou –‘Can the gap, the opening, the Void which precedes the gesture of subjectivization still be called “subject”?’ –is an emphatic ‘Yes!’ – the subject is both at the same time, the ontological gap (the ‘night of the world’, the madness of radical self-withdrawal) as well as the gesture of subjectivization which, by means of a short circuit between the Universal and the Particular, heals the wound of this gap … In other words, the subject’s very endeavor to fill in the gap retroactively sustains and generates this gap.
The ‘death drive’ is thus the constitutive obverse of every emphatic assertion of Truth irreducible to the positive order of Being: the negative gesture that clears a space for creative sublimation. The fact that sublimation presupposes the death drive means that when we are enthusiastically transfixed by a sublime object, this object is a ‘mask of death’, a veil that covers up the primordial ontological Void – as Nietzsche would have put it: to will this sublime object effectively amount to willing a Nothingness.[1]
Lacan’s point is that this limit-experience is the irreducible/constitutive condition of the (im)possibility of the creative act of embracing a Truth-Event: it opens up and sustains the space for the Truth-Event; yet its excess always threaten to undermine it.
Classic onto-theology is focused on the triad of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. What Lacan does is to push these three notions to their limit, demonstrating that the Good is the mask of ‘diabolical’ Evil, that the Beautiful is the mask of the Ugly, of the disgusting horror of the Real, and that the True is the mask of the central Void around which every symbolic edifice is woven.
In short, there is a domain ‘beyond the Good’ that is not simply everyday pathological villainy, but the constitutive background of the Good itself, the terrifying ambiguous source of its power; there is domain ‘beyond the Beautiful’ that is not simply the ugliness of ordinary everyday objects, but the constitutive background of the Beauty itself, the Horror veiled by the fascinating presence of Beauty, there is a domain ‘beyond Truth’ that is not simply the everyday domain of lies, deceptions and falsities, the Void that sustains the place in which one can only formulate symbolic fictions that we call ‘truths’.
If there is an ethico-political lesson of psychoanalysis, it consists in the insight into how the great calamities of our century (from the Holocaust to the Stalinist desastre) are not the result of our succumbing to the morbid attraction of this Beyond but, on the contrary, the result of our endeavor to avoid confronting it and to impose the direct rule of Truth and/or Goodness.[2]
[1] Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, (London – New York: Verso, 1999) 159
[2] Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, (London – New York: Verso, 1999) 161
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Lisa Neighbour - I'll See You 2008 engraved knife blade
Just kidding, I'm not dead. But Sally has a bad cold.
At Lisa's opening we discussed our ideal last words. I want to have sent, posthuminously, an email that reads: "I'm dead, you're not". Lisa has promised a blade version in that eventuality, though I prefer to think of myself as exempt . (and at that moment I might just end up saying shitfuckdamncocksucker)
- L.M. 4-22-2008 12:31 pm
Lisa's show was great! I had a similar highly intellectual conversation at the opening with my colleague Rev. Earl Chunx. The Rev. decided his last words would be 'It should have been you.' I chose the more pathetic 'why me?!'
- mnobody (guest) 4-24-2008 7:53 pm
AAAAAAWWWWWWW!
You two were made for each other.
- L.M. 4-24-2008 7:55 pm
Excerpts from: Slavoj Zizek, "The Ticklish Subject"
In short, the Lacanian answer to the question asked by such different philosophers as Althusser, Derrida and Badiou –‘Can the gap, the opening, the Void which precedes the gesture of subjectivization still be called “subject”?’ –is an emphatic ‘Yes!’ – the subject is both at the same time, the ontological gap (the ‘night of the world’, the madness of radical self-withdrawal) as well as the gesture of subjectivization which, by means of a short circuit between the Universal and the Particular, heals the wound of this gap … In other words, the subject’s very endeavor to fill in the gap retroactively sustains and generates this gap.
The ‘death drive’ is thus the constitutive obverse of every emphatic assertion of Truth irreducible to the positive order of Being: the negative gesture that clears a space for creative sublimation. The fact that sublimation presupposes the death drive means that when we are enthusiastically transfixed by a sublime object, this object is a ‘mask of death’, a veil that covers up the primordial ontological Void – as Nietzsche would have put it: to will this sublime object effectively amount to willing a Nothingness.[1]
Lacan’s point is that this limit-experience is the irreducible/constitutive condition of the (im)possibility of the creative act of embracing a Truth-Event: it opens up and sustains the space for the Truth-Event; yet its excess always threaten to undermine it.
Classic onto-theology is focused on the triad of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. What Lacan does is to push these three notions to their limit, demonstrating that the Good is the mask of ‘diabolical’ Evil, that the Beautiful is the mask of the Ugly, of the disgusting horror of the Real, and that the True is the mask of the central Void around which every symbolic edifice is woven.
In short, there is a domain ‘beyond the Good’ that is not simply everyday pathological villainy, but the constitutive background of the Good itself, the terrifying ambiguous source of its power; there is domain ‘beyond the Beautiful’ that is not simply the ugliness of ordinary everyday objects, but the constitutive background of the Beauty itself, the Horror veiled by the fascinating presence of Beauty, there is a domain ‘beyond Truth’ that is not simply the everyday domain of lies, deceptions and falsities, the Void that sustains the place in which one can only formulate symbolic fictions that we call ‘truths’.
If there is an ethico-political lesson of psychoanalysis, it consists in the insight into how the great calamities of our century (from the Holocaust to the Stalinist desastre) are not the result of our succumbing to the morbid attraction of this Beyond but, on the contrary, the result of our endeavor to avoid confronting it and to impose the direct rule of Truth and/or Goodness.[2]
[1] Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, (London – New York: Verso, 1999) 159
[2] Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, (London – New York: Verso, 1999) 161
- carla garnet (guest) 5-01-2008 1:40 am