Tutt writes:

“Accelerationism is an anti-politics. It effectively operates on a double-bind logic:

either embrace capital and its imperatives of unregulated accumulation or fall into despair, either speed up or slow down.

Indeed, this frenetic, schizo and manic quality to the discourse around accelerationism has characterized it ever since its origins with Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

The premise behind accelerationism, as Benjamin Noys points out in his excellent study Malign Velocities, tends to assess the predominant psychic disorders of capitalism:

psychopathy, narcissistic personality disorder, schizophrenia, depression, hysteria, anxiety, etc. by intensifying them in order to transcend their limit.

Michel Clouscard makes the important point that we must distinguish this naive idea of schizophrenia as Deleuze and Guattari mean it as poetic-worldly claim to cultural status and a sign of caste from schizophrenia, an illness about which we know very little, but which we do try to treat.

Indeed, as always, Clouscard hits the mark.

The schizo subject is a neo-mandarinite subject, a type of aesthetic signaling and posture that has led the left to think that being cool and hip is what it means to be militant and revolutionary.

It is the disintegration of this particular counterculture subject that has disappeared with the dissolution of left-accelerationism.

And we should welcome this disintegration.

There was, after all, a utopian and romantic element to left-accelerationism in that it proposed a postcapitalist world without work, UBI, fully-automated luxury communism and all that jazz.

Not only were these ideas naïve, they misunderstood some basic facts about capitalism, namely that labor remains the primary source of value and that multi-sector automation is impossible in capitalism.

Left-accelerationists made the error of placing planning ahead of organizing, they thought they could circumvent the problem of consciousness, awareness, and struggle through technological planning”

via

"To be a racist is to revel in one’s immorality along with others... even if none ever admit consciously to this reveling.

As a racist, one knows that one acts in violation of the fundamental tenet of modernity—its insistence on universal equality," writes McGowan.

In one sense "Racism emerges with the idea of universal equality that reveals the injustice of racism."

"This means that there are no innocent racists, no one who is a racist without a sense of its immorality, even if the knowledge of the immorality is unconscious" writes McGowan.

"As modernity emerged, religion ceased to function as the primary social adhesive. Race replaced it" writes McGowan.

"Violence erupts at the moment when reality no longer seems informed by the fantasy—the point when one can no longer enjoy the reality," writes McGowan.

"Racist ideology allows" some people "to feel as if they belong to the capitalist society that otherwise exploits them;"

"a sense of identity enables one to endure" "one’s isolated particularity" "As long as one can believe" "one is one’s identity" writes Todd McGowan.

"Being shot by a police officer is a leading cause of death for young Black men in American society.

This fact alone bespeaks the incredible power of the racist fantasy," writes McGowan.

"There are no longer lynchings in contemporary American society.

Officer shootings have replaced them". The closer people get to seeing their racism, the more likely is their violence.

"Exposed...the fantasies that inform our daily interactions lose the appeal that derives from their very hiddenness," McGowan says.

The racist fantasy operates all the more where we think we are not racist.

McGowan writes that "The racist fantasy... retains its power... insofar as it remains hidden. To experience a fantasy openly is to wake up from the dream that is our everyday social reality."

"Violence is an attempt to restore the sense of reality that breaks down in order to preserve the fantasy as a vehicle for enjoyment,"

writes McGowan.

"Violence tries to preserve the fantasy by keeping it at a distance from reality," writes McGowan.

"The sense of reality and its underlying fantasy deliver enjoyment to members of a society while simultaneously keeping this enjoyment at bay. That is, our social reality continues to exist in a way that portions out a steady stream of enjoyment that remains at a low level," writes McGowan.

"The way out of an investment in the racist fantasy requires taking responsibility for one’s own enjoyment".

"For those invested in the racist fantasy, the more that they point out their social privileges, the more that they posit their lack of enjoyment and highlight the racial other’s enjoyment advantage. In this way, they miss the site where their racism produces the enjoyment that sustains it," writes McGowan.

"Enjoyment is located ...in nonbelonging to the social order, not belonging," writes McGowan.

"By pointing out one’s white privilege, one enhances the fantasmatic image of the unrestrained enjoyment of blackness. The language of “white privilege” affirms the positions that white and Black already have in the racist fantasy, which is why it tends to affirm rather than challenge the racist fantasy," writes McGowan.

"The attacks on white privilege actually feed racism rather than undermining it, which is why liberal whites are so often eager to criticize their own privilege. When they do so, they actually augment their enjoyment that occurs through the fantasy of the racial other," writes McGowan.

"If we leave the fantasy untouched, racism will continue unabated. Seeing racism in terms of an uneven distribution of power that excludes the racial other misses the role that this other plays in the enjoyment of those who have the power," writes McGowan.

"Racism functions through the enjoyment of the racial other, an enjoyment that makes no sense as long as one thinks in terms of the distribution of power," writes Todd McGowan.

Fascism is often trying to appeal through no longer bothering about civility.

A symptom is how we enjoy the unconscious in being determined by the unconscious.

"IF RACISM IS UNCONSCIOUS,...THE PROBLEM IS NOT SIMPLY A DEFICIT OF KNOWLEDGE...

PEOPLE ENJOY AT ODDS WITH HOW THEY KNOW.

...THEY ENJOY NOT IN SPITE OF KNOWING BUT BECAUSE THEY KNOW BETTER," WRITES MCGOWAN

"What's unconscious about racism is...the way that it produces enjoyment for the subject", writes McGOWAN

Capitalist compensations

Individualism is an empty compensation for the isolation under capitalism.

Selling us identity aka identity politics is how capitalism tries to make us care only about our own particular interests.

"Capitalist ideology insists that all I have is my own particular interests," writes Todd McGowan.

"Capitalism gives me individuality while simultaneously making it worthless," writes McGowan.

"The more we emphasize the importance of identity, through efforts such as including our preferred pronoun along with our introduction, the more we promulgate the idea that our identity is really who we are & the more we obfuscate the singularity of our subjectivity," writes McGowan.

The struggle against racism is not a struggle for a particular identity but for equality.

Turning the focus from racism to racial identity, concedes "the ground of the universal," writes McGowan

Seeing my own lack lets me see others not just as rivals.

Recognition of one's own lack allows one to view others "not just as rivals," writes Todd McGowan

Our lack is repressed in capitalism.

"Every oppressive act is the attempt to push lack onto the other," writes McGowan.

Capitalism has to be oppressive as it has to make us repress our lack.

The struggle against oppression involves to become able to see our own selfdivision, not just the other's selfdivision, writes Todd McGowan.

Capitalism hinders this ability by boosting identitariamism.

McGowan writes that Identitarians "give up on the possibility that emancipation might occur for everyone".

The racist is blind to "the other's alienation as the basis for the shared bond that exists," writes Todd McGowan.

Racists feel alienated and isolated but seek a bond in a destructive way rather than in the bond of how all are equal.

Racists deny how all are equal.

RACISM IS UNCONSCIOUS IN HOW WE RELATE TO OUR CONSCIOUSNESS REMAINS UNKNOWN TO US.

Our relating to our conscious being is our unconscious.

We get to know ourselves in how we cannot know ourselves.

We reduce our racism in relating to how we enjoy our alienation.

We get to know our hidden racism in becoming what we are, in opening our eyes to the unconscious parts of us that lay out in the open for all to see.

The unconscious is in the partly alienated way we relate to our consciousness.

Becoming what we are through alienation helps against racism.

We check our racism in checking the way we relate to our consciousness.

We stick out from the natural world for ignoring our unconscious means not permitting ourselves to simply to see what we are.

We become, who we are by allowing to see what we are and partly by accepting that we never are who we are.

WHAT IS UNCONSCIOUS ABOUT RACISM IS THE WAY IT CREATES ENJOYMENT.

SOMETIMES IT IS A NEGATIVE OR LESS OBVIOUS ENJOYMENT LIKE ENJOYING BEING GRUMPY OR MEAN.

REFERENCES

"This way of relating to consciousness is the unconscious", writes McGowan.

"Subjects stick out from the natural world ... because their unconscious never permits them simply to be what they are," writes McGowan.

Todd Mcgowan, Embracing Alienation, 2024, Repeater Books

Berlin 2024, Andy Vantino

“This is what Rammstein does to totalitarian ideology:

it de-semanticizes it and brings forward its obscene babble in its intrusive materiality.”

“The identification with Rammstein is a direct over-identification with sinthoms which undermines ideological identification.

We should not fear this direct over-identification – what we should fear is the articulation of this chaotic field of energy into a (Fascist) universe of meaning.

No wonder Rammstein's music is violent, materially present, invading, and intrusive with its strong volume and deep vibrations – its materiality is in constant tension with its meaning, undermining it.

Rammstein thus de-semanticizes totalitarian ideology:

it brings forward its obscene babble in its intrusive materiality.

No wonder Rammstein's music is violent, materially present, invading, and intrusive with its strong volume and deep vibrations – its materiality is in constant tension with its meaning, undermining it.

In short, Rammstein liberates Nazi sinthoms from their Nazi articulation:

they are offered to be enjoyed in their pre-ideological status of "knots" of libidinal investment.

So when, while watching a Rammstein video clip depicting a blonde girl in a cage and dark uniforms evoking Nordic warriors, some Leftist liberals fear that the uneducated public will miss the irony (if there is any) and directly identify with the proto-Fascist sensibility displayed here, one should counter it with the good old motto:

the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

“when Rammstein stage totalitarian rituals, the viewer doesn't need to detect any "ironic subtlety":

these rituals are "extraneated" in their very ridiculous over-presence, in the very disgusting/disturbing excess of enjoyment.

As for the obvious fact that in the Auslander video clip, blacks are portrayed in the mode of white racist clichés:

of course, because Auslander is not about real Blacks but about Blacks as part of White racist fantasies – the point is to ruin these fantasies from within, displaying their disgusting ridiculousness.

A couple of decades ago in Carinthia (Kärnten), Austria's southern province which borders Slovenia, German nationalists organized a campaign against the alleged Slovene "threat" under the motto "Kärnten bleibt deutsch!" Austrian Leftists found a perfect answer.

Instead of rational counter-argumentation, they printed paid advertisements in the main newspapers with obscene, disgusting-sounding variations of the nationalists' motto:

"Kärnten deibt bleutsch! Kärnten leibt beutsch! Kärnten beibt dleutsch!" Isn't this procedure worthy of the obscene, "anal," meaningless speech spoken by Hynkel, the Hitler figure in Chaplin's The Great Dictator?”

“Does Rammstein's music not perfectly exemplify the distinction between sense and presence, the tension in a work of art between the hermeneutic dimension and the dimension of presence "this side of hermeneutics," a dimension which Lacan indicated by the term sinthom (formula-knot of jouissance) as opposed to symptom (bearer of meaning)?”

via

We are raised to become completely unable to do so. Iam quoting below from McGowan’s Pure Excess:

Refusal to link excess to lack drives the production of so much waste in capitalism.

If one seeks pure excess, one must discard a commodity as soon as it betrays the slightest failure to be excessive.

With the emergence of capitalist modernity, what changes is the role excess plays in enjoyment

Capitalist society organizes everyone around a useless excess.

In capitalism, a product appears magical because it allows us to dream of overcoming all lack & experiencing unbridled excess.

To produce or consume just enough for the planet to remain habitable is impossible under the logic.

Capitalism is a threat to the planet because capitalism marginalizes the good entirely for the sake of the production of a useless excess.

Capitalism always produces more than enough, even to the point where this excess threatens existence itself.

Capitalism is making the planet unfit for human life.

In the logic of the capitalist system the climate disaster will remain inevitable.

There are no capitalist fixes.

By reducing the other to a fetish object, the pervert castrates the other in order not to face the consequences of their own castration

Daniel Tutt

in the sexual act the pervert makes themselves into the objet a, or the object cause of desire, and this happens through the fantasy of an undivided sexual union.

Daniel Tutt

One would think that because perversion entails an instrumentalizing of the other’s jouissance, that all perverse acts are fundamentally sadistic, however

Daniel Tutt

Perversion becomes a strategy for coping with the repetition of monstrous forms of jouissance that haunt the body.

Daniel Tutt

it is anxiety over jouissance, defined here not only as enjoyment

but also as any bodily or emotional response that exceeds the subject’s control, that is the beating pulse of the repetition at stake in perversion.

Daniel Tutt

to demonstrate to the mother that she is not castrated

i.e., it is a demonstration that the pervert’s jouissance need not be limited by or dependent upon the desire of another person.

Daniel Tutt

the disavowal at work in perversion originates from the pervert’s attempt to demonstrate to the mother that she is not castrated,

Daniel Tutt

if the other is reduced to a fetish in perversion, why is there a disavowal of the other?

Daniel Tutt

the pervert enacts castration on the other by making themselves into the instrument of the other’s jouissance

and this reduces the other to a pure fetish

Daniel Tutt

the pervert resists their own castration.

This means that the pervert enacts castration on the other

Daniel Tutt

the neurotic represses, the psychotic forecloses, and the pervert disavows.

Daniel Tutt

what is disavowed in perversion is castration.

Daniel Tutt

this is equivalent to turning oneself into an instrument of the other’s enjoyment.

Daniel Tutt

pervert castrates the other by making the other into a fetish.

Daniel Tutt

hysteria… protests a master while concealing a secret dependence on that master

the pervert resists the other, while concealing a secret dependence on the mother.

Daniel Tutt

perversion involves resistance to normalization

i.e., the perverse act is a form of protesting social norms.

Daniel Tutt

the lawless legislation engenders jouissance in excess.

The real emerges precisely from the impossibility of the actualization of the Sadean fantasy

…

it is not that the real itself is impossible, but it comes from the impossible.

Daniel Tutt

NOTES

Daniel's Journal

Lacan's Cruelty

I’m pleased to share my book review of Meera Lee’s new edited collection of essays entitled Lacan’s Cruelty: Perversion Beyond Philosophy, Culture and Clinic, a modified version of this review will be out soon with the Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society…

Read more

2 years ago · 3 likes · Daniel Tutt

"If the capitalist zombie endlessly accrues to its own detriment, the ghost allows us to accept our position in relation to our drives," writes Helen Rollins.

"Zombies serve as a metaphor for unregulated capitalist drive".

"Like a zombie, the capitalist accrues, destroying himself for the promise of an eventual comfort that will never come."

"Ghosts confront us with the difficulty of desire in all its contradictions".

Ghosts are half living, half dead. "A ghost is the presence of an absence," writes Rollins.

A ghost exists and doesn’t, "reflective of the polyvalent way that human’s want things, the nature of human desire itself," writes Rollins.

"We are inhabited by our failures. But this haunting" "animates our very being, it inflames our desire," writes Rollins.

"It allows for a fantasy" "that the original object might have made us transcendentally happier."

"To be desiring subjects, we need something out of reach," writes Rollins.

"Without this absent original object we couldn’t function as desiring subjects. We need its presence and its absence: we are happiest with it, but without it," writes Rollins.

"While ordinary desire seeks its overcoming in an object, drive seeks the failure itself," writes Rollins.

"We cannot overcome our lack and we cannot overcome our distorted ways of wanting things, but by bringing them to the level of consciousness we can lower the stakes."

Capitalism's drive seeks expansion, not universality. A universalist society sees contradiction as necessary & enjoyable, not as obstacle to be avoided, writes Rollins

"Capitalism cannot attain this because it needs us to accrue like zombies, but it is haunted by the threat of this realization," writes Rollins.

"We must not let our desires pass us by, but we also must not believe that achieving our fantasies is where we will find true happiness," writes Rollins.

We find enjoyment in the not getting, "it is the not getting itself that gives us meaning". Seeing this, "we can lower the stakes" of our "drive & exchange the rollercoaster of pain & disappointment".

"Drive is unconscious and seeks the repetition of failure."

Drive "separates us from animals and is a relic of our initial marking with lack".

Drive is "the unconscious addressing of our lack".

Drive can cause great suffering. "It is continually eating despite being full," writes Rollins.

Drive "is the need to accrue more wealth than we could" spend.

An example of drive "is exercising excessively and never knowing when to stop."

"Drive is co-opted by capitalism".

"We might even say that capitalism is a psychic and libidinal nexus that emerges from this distorted form of desire."

Notes

https://www.sublationmag.com/post/ghosts-vs-zombies-desire-drive-and-capitalism

"Racism permits capitalist society to cut off the dissatisfaction that would otherwise call capitalism into question," writes McGowan

"The racist fantasy...provides a matrix through which racism becomes enjoyable for its perpetrators," writes McGowan.

"Because the racist fantasy operates primarily in the unconscious, it is more widespread than racist ideology," writes McGowan.

"Racism remains intractable as long as it remains enjoyable," writes McGowan on how we have to move the underground of enjoyment and fantasy to fight racism.

"Racist ideology allows certain members of the working class to feel as if they belong to the capitalist society that otherwise exploits them," writes McGowan.

The racism makes it out as if a question is a question of race. Race comes from racism, not from what is there.

"The colorblind position insists that we should not see race at all, that seeing race is the cause of racism".

"The proponents of colorblindness have the causality backward: it is not race that produces racism but racism that produces race."

"The colorblind position" is "that the absence of conscious racism eliminates racism as such".

Proposing to become colorblind "overlooks that racism functions within social institutions, like policing and imprisoning, to ensure that the racial divide remains potent".

"it is not race that produces racism but racism that produces race."

"Success for Black Lives Matter could only be everyone ...recognizing that we all partake in the nonbelonging that the murdered black people represent".

The point "is not to include all within the social structure but to recognize the failure of all inclusion".

The universal is what all the particulars lack.

"the solidarity organized around a shared absence does not necessitate the nonbelonging of some because it accepts that no one really belongs."

We cannot discover universal solidarity through the act of belonging.

"The universal is not all particulars assembled together."

"This is the only way to avoid the problem that stems from adding one particular after another in order to arrive at an all that always leaves some out."

The universal isn't all particulars added but what all lack. It's more than inclusionism: not simply to include all "but to recognize the failure of all inclusion".

Inclusionism leaves us "with the sense that we could always do more. ...There will always be... one more position that doesn’t belong that must be brought inside."

"We see race in order not to see racism."

"When we turn the focus ...from racism to racial identity, we have already conceded the ground of the universal."

“Disguised as race, racism becomes something Afro-Americans are, rather than something racists do," "the Fields sisters note".

"It is not race that produces racism." "It is" "racism that produces race," writes McGowan.

"The struggle for equality is not a struggle for a particular identity but for the elimination of racism."

"Black Lives Matter aims at blocking police violence, eliminating the criminalization of blackness, & even extirpating the racism at work in policing."

"In short, it calls for black equality that racism makes impossible."

Conservatives imagine that the struggle taking place is always between competing particular identities & paint Black Lives Matter as identity politics.

As the universal is an absence "it is the province of those who don’t belong rather than of insiders."

Full realization of universal equality "would eliminate all nonbelonging and thus the very source of equality,'' writes McGowan.

"The struggle for universal equality" must never stop and it never stops precisely because "the universal cannot become fully present";

"It is possible for a social order to recognize the universality of nonbelonging rather than attempting to eliminate or repress it," writes McGowan.

"Black Lives Matter is a universal movement because it is a particular that changes all particulars," says Engley.

"You change structure by being a particular that changes all particulars,"

"the particular that changes all particulars" is the universality," says Ryan Engley.

"Capitalist production is always overproduction, the production of an excess," writes McGowan.

"This excessive production of what is not necessary is, ironically, necessary for capitalism to live on," writes McGowan.

"Without the production of a useless" excess that goes beyond what people require, capitalism would not reproduce itself, writes McGowan.

"Without the production of a useless" excess that goes beyond what people require," "there would be no profit," writes McGowan.

"All those who invest themselves in capitalism must adopt" its "psychic structure to get by within the system," writes McGowan.

"Capitalism seduces us with the image of pure excess."

"Those who don't find themselves excluded & left behind," writes McGowan.

A commodity's "excess always involves someone's hidden sacrifice." The structural link between excess & lack the form itself works to hide he writes.

"Excess is always impure, which is not a defect but precisely what enables it to be excessive," writes McGowan.

"We become excessive through what we lack, which is evident when weaknesses lead us to develop strengths," writes McGowan.

"Failure drives us to work harder for success. The link between lack & excess constantly confronts us," writes McGowan.

A commodity's "image of pure excess tells us that we can break this link and experience excess without anything missing," writes McGowan.

"Paying ten dollars for a tub of popcorn that one could make at home for a tenth of the price gives it a value that heightens the enjoyment of eating it," writes McGowan.

"One knows that one is paying too much, but it is" this that gives the popcorn at the theater such a better taste, writes McGowan.

Notes

Todd McGowan. Pure Excess. Columbia University Press. 2024

"If it's not growing, capitalist society is dying," writes McGowan.

"As long as we remain within the logic of the capitalist system & under the dominance of the commodity form, the climate disaster will remain inevitable," writes McGowan.

"There are no capitalist fixes, despite the fantasies of renewable energy manufacturers."

Capitalism doesn't simply produce to reproduce itself but produces more "to the point where this excess threatens existence itself," writes McGowan.

"Within capitalism, producing & consuming more has infinitely more value than ensuring that there is even a single person left alive to enjoy the fruits of this production."

"No matter how much ecological activists try to shift attention to the problem of reproduction, they fail to gain enough traction in the capitalist universe."

If the climate emergency requires" acceptance of limits, "it will never be acceptable for capitalist society," writes McGowan.

"Survival is a good that doesn't concern capitalism," writes McGowan.

"The survival of the planet as a habitable place for humanity is not a concern of capitalist society."

"This society reproduces itself through the production of a surplus".

There is no brake in capitalism "on the production of this surplus." "If the production of a surplus renders the earth uninhabitable, that" is just something to happen "from the perspective of the capitalist system itself."

"This is why we are on the brink of catastrophe."

"If it's not growing, capitalist society is dying."

But overcoming modernity is not what is needed.

Modernity is excessive too, but the problem is the excess of the capitalist compulsion to eat up all ressources.

A reactionary wants to return to premodern society.

Some reject modernity outright as if this is an "answer to the problem that capitalism sets forth"

Wanting to undo modern life leads Heidegger "straight into the embrace of a murderous Nazi regime," writes McGowan.

"Heidegger's error is to identify modernity wholly with the predominance of the commodity form & not to see that modernity itself encompasses possibilities beyond capitalism," writes McGowan.

"we must think modernity not as the choice among unlimited possibilities, not as an excess without constraint, but as an opening to the act through which the subject limits itself."

"Modernity without capitalism is excess determined through lack," writes McGowan.

"Heidegger can never recognize the excessiveness that modernity opens up for the subject."

"Heidegger shortchanges subjectivity and thereby remains in the position of waiting for salvation from some external power" like Nazism, writes McGowan.

Notes

Todd McGowan. Pure Excess. Columbia University Press 2024

Capitalism 'repairs' itself constantly by moving its unresolved problems to larger & larger scales, writes Jameson in Representing Capital.

The capitalist machine constantly breaks down.

repairing itself Not exactly by solving its local problems.

No wonder we are neurotic, having to internalize capitalism's twisted form of self-care.

"CAPITALIST COMPETITION DOES NOT LEAD TO FREE SUBJECTS BUT TO NEUROTIC ONES."

"IT REQUIRES REPRESSION IN ORDER TO FIT SUBJECTS INTO THE LIMITED POSITIONS," WRITES MCGOWAN.

THE "UNDERLYING BELIEF THAT SUSTAINS THE CAPITALIST ECONOMY" "TELLS THE SUBJECT HOW TO DESIRE & THE SUBJECT WHO ACCEPTS THIS OTHER BECOMES NEUROTIC."

"THE NEUROTIC SYMPTOM EMERGES OUT OF THE SUBJECT'S REFUSAL TO SUBMIT COMPLETELY".

"IF WE ARE ALL NEUROTIC... WE ALL HAVE SOME DEGREE OF INVESTMENT IN THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM."

To survive, Capitalism destroys public life

Without the universality we find in our public spirit, we feel smaller.

We seek meaning through making each other visible.

Thanks to public life, we don't need to make a story about society that serves only ourselves.

Making a story only for ourselves serves to justify our disgruntled isolation to us.

Capitalism wants us to be unknown to us neurotically.

Populists know to offer us this victimhood.

What makes us obedient citizens:

perceiving ourselves as transgressive in our very misery of feeling guilty for being unhappy.

Enjoying Mere inner resistance then leads us somehow to thinking of ourselves as sufficiently insubordinate.

what is causing us feelings of self-contradiction is our anxious hope to appease others including Capitalism.

When we neurotically feel aversions to take up social roles we display a scepticism towards the uprightness of symbolic mandates or jobs.

We are troubled by the idea of taking up the role of being a public persona.

A public role, the neurotic capitalist subject feels, only works into the hands of the obscene underside of the workings of a society run by masks.

Modernity involves "the inability of subjects to assume symbolic mandates," writes Zizek.

What prevents them is the "perception of a ‘stain of enjoyment’ in the big Other," the Law as infested with an obscene underside.

"The repression of the public sphere ends up suffocating subjects living under authoritarian rule," writes Todd McGowan.

That subjects under authoritarianism can view their private lives as a resistance testifies to authoritarianism effectively killing the threat to itself.

Authoritarianism Prohibits public acts like demonstrations or debates, while it tolerates private peccadillos or drunkenness, writes McGowan.

"Without a recognition of the necessity of the state, we come to see ourselves as involved in a pitiless war of all against all".

"The sacrifice of the contentiousness of the public sphere produces a social order that seems to run smoothly," writes McGowan.

Authoritarian rule treats individuals as isolated monads.

"One must have the public world of the state to be able to endure one’s private life".

"The state today appears as an oppressive force because it has largely become an arm... serving as the handmaiden for the forces of capitalism".

"When this occurs, the state loses its capacity for giving individuals an ethical basis for their existence," he writes.

"When the capitalist economy displaces the state in this way, it" disguises our solidarity as subjects, he writes.

"Once the capitalist economy gains priority over the state form, the fundamental contradiction that defines our political being recedes from view."

"Capitalist subjects do not view themselves as political beings. Their individuality simply exists on its own, not through the mediation of the universal."

"As a result, they experience themselves as private entities. Capitalism’s assault on the public world leaves subjects immersed in their own private particularity,” writes McGowan.

At a glance, We seem free today "because conditions of life seem accidental," write Marx & Engels.

"in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are to a greater extent governed by material forces,” say Marx and Engels.

"The problem with the society of commanded enjoyment" "is the barrier that it proves to enjoyment”.

incivility hides obedience:

Our society is full of obedient subjects committed to symbolic identity & status, says McGowan

Obedience "disguises itself as its opposite—as rebellion."

Empty rebellion never moves the confines of symbolic authority.

seemingly disobedient school shooters for example indirectly reaffirm authority & the identity that goes with it, McGowan writes.

“social conformity” has a “tendency to induce aggressiveness in the subject,” says Lacan as McGowan tells us.

“Symbolic authority in the society of enjoyment commands enjoyment," writes McGowan.

"Thus when subjects react violently against the supposed theft of their enjoyment, they obey," says McGowan

commanded enjoyment as “an ethos of zealously defending & asserting one’s private enjoyment becomes the prevalent “moral”".

"The problem with the society of commanded enjoyment" "is not the enjoyment it unleashes"

"The problem with the society of commanded enjoyment" "is the barrier that it proves to enjoyment”.

"In this society, subjects depend” for recognition “on the public world that they reject,” says McGowan.

“There must be a fragility to our enjoyment. The precariousness of our relation to what we enjoy is the source of our enjoyment."

The widespread displays of private enjoyment "testify to the failure of the contemporary retreat into privacy," writes McGowan.

"We abandon the public world, & yet we continue to demand that the big Other acknowledge us as enjoying subjects," writes McGowan.

Today’s society of chasing private enjoyments transformed social life into a proving ground.

"one attempts to establish oneself as an enjoying subject, as noncastrated”, writes McGowan.

"rather than actually acting to break from the social bond, we have merely fantasized doing so," writes McGowan.

obedience disguises itself as radicality.

"convincing subjects that they are radical has become the primary function of ideology today."

"If I believe that I am already radical while I am following the dictates of the social order, I am not likely to challenge those".

Notes

With direct & indirect quotes & notes from texts by McGowan and others

Todd McGowan. Emancipation after Hegel

What characterizes a product & a christmas present in capitalism is the promise of pure excess.

In capitalism, a product "appears magical because it allows us to dream of overcoming all lack & experiencing unbridled excess,” writes Todd McGowan.

Capitalist production is excessive.

The promise of its products has its own excessiveness.

And our going from promise of excess to promise of excess is in its own way excessive.

"This is why we are on the brink of catastrophe":

"The system is the only social form that uses excessive production to reproduce itself," writes McGowan.

In the logic of the capitalist system the climate disaster will remain inevitable, writes McGowan.

"There are no capitalist fixes, despite the fantasies of renewable energy manufacturers."

"Capitalist society stands out because it doesn’t simply produce enough to reproduce itself," he writes.

Capitalism "always produces more than enough, even to the point where this excess threatens existence itself," McGowan writes.

Capitalism is "making the planet unfit for human life not because people privilege their own good," he writes.

Capitalism is a threat to the planet "because capitalism marginalizes the good entirely" "for the sake of the production of a useless excess," writes McGowan.

"The only value in capitalist society lies in producing and consuming a surplus, not in sufficiency," he writes.

To produce or consume just enough for the planet to remain habitable is impossible under the logic that sustains capitalism, writes McGowan.

"To produce or consume just enough is always to fall short and defy the fundamental logic that sustains the system," writes McGowan.

Capitalist society runs on the production and consumption of a surplus, he writes.

Those of us who don't seek personal gain seem almost insane to others.

"Not to maximize what one has simply doesn’t make sense," writes McGowan.

Modernity reveals there is no excess that doesn’t involve a corresponding lack. Capitalism betrays the modern opening.

Capitalism rejects the egalitarian connection between lack & excess that unites, writes McGowan.

Artistic form provides a productive limit, while capitalism promises production without limit.

Artistic form is a constant challenge to capitalism’s logic.

Capitalism encounters the artist’s form of excess as an existential threat to its promise of unalloyed excess, writes McGowan

"The response to capitalism can find a paradigm in aesthetics," writes McGowan.

"How people enjoy themselves does not change with the emergence of capitalist modernity."

"What changes is the role that this excess plays in the social order."

Capitalist society organizes everyone around a useless excess.

"Excess does have priority relative to questions of utility because it gives us a reason to live," writes McGowan.

"It is the refusal to link excess to lack that drives the production of so much waste in capitalist society."

"If one seeks pure excess, one must discard a commodity as soon as it betrays the slightest failure to be excessive," he writes.

"Recognizing the connection between lack and excess leads one not to be so quick to throw away the one object or to buy the new one," he writes.

"The flight from lack makes equality impossible";

"the fantasy of pure excess ensures that some will try to have this excess at the expense of others."

"The dominance of the commodity form doesn’t allow people to see that there is enough for everyone to be lacking together," writes McGowan.

"The fantasy of a pure excess separates us into those who have and those who have not," writes McGowan

Notes

All direct & indirect quotes & notes from:

Pure Excess.

Todd McGowan,

Columbia University Press

2024

No one figures out another completely and then stays with them, he writes.

We build an excessive attachment to those who defy our making sense of them, writes McGowan.

In capitalism, a product "appears magical because it allows us to dream of overcoming all lack & experiencing unbridled excess.”

The ruling class needs war to keep us poor & to stay in power, argues Walter Benjamin.

War itself becomes a form of art that serves to make us choose our own misery.

Create art, destroy the world, says fascism going to war, says Benjamin.

His example is Marinetti's futurist manifesto.

The Futurists articulated war cult as an aesthetic form, writes Susan Buck-Morss.

Benjamin cites their manifesto:

"War is beautiful because it establishes human domination over the subjugated machinery".

"War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body," it says.

"War is beautiful because it fuses gun-fire" & "the stench of putrefaction into a symphony," says the manifesto.

With this manifesto, the aesthetic justification of fascist war was in place at the 20th century's start, writes Buck-Morss.

We are asked to love war for the richest to justify their injustices through selling us hate & sacrifice.

War serves to justify suffering.

Hardship today is created by the economic logic of the richest.

Fascism aestheticizes war to sell suffering by promising to make others suffer more.

We are living under a system of overproduction while everything is too

expensive with inequality.

War in its own way 'solves' our lack of buying power by destroying the products & our lives too.

The less people have, the more pressure capital can build towards war.

Poverty today is made into the normal.

Our lives have been largely reduced to the same baseline which is extreme poverty.

Capital dehumanizes & takes all dignity only to then parade autocrats as if they organize for the people.

Fascism is not giving the masses their due.

Fascism is only allowing the masses to express themselves without giving the masses anything.

Benjamin seldom makes sweeping condemnations, but states categorically:

"All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war."

Fascism's use of the technical apparatus parallels fascism's violent "attempt to organize the newly proletarianized masses," writes Benjamin.

Our gratification of a sense perception has been altered by technology, says Buck-Morss.

Humanity's destruction was once an object of spectacle for the Olympian gods & now is a spectacle for humanity itself enjoying its decline, she writes.

Enjoying our destruction as art is the perfection of art for art's sake, writes Benjamin.

Communism responds with the politicization of art, writes Benjamin.

The paragraph by Benjamin on war has haunted me for 20-odd years, writes Buck-Morss.

War spectacles in the present make Benjamin stand out still.

Our self-alienation has become such that we are experiencing our own destruction as an aesthetic enjoyment, says Benjamin.

Enjoying our destruction as art happens in the aestheticization of politics managed by fascism.

"Benjamin is saying that sensory alienation lies at the source of the aestheticization of politics," she writes.

All this, "fascism does not create, but merely "manages"," writes Buck-Morss.

"The Communist response to this crisis is to "politicize art," implying— what? Surely Benjamin must mean more than merely to make culture a vehicle for Communist propaganda," she writes.

Benjamin "is demanding of art a task far more difficult," writes Buck-Morss.

Culture could help "undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium," she writes.

Culture could "restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses," she writes.

Restoring our senses could be necessary "for the sake of humanity's self-preservation," she writes.

"Not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them," writes Buck-Morss.

Alienation and technology must be accepted as fact.

This way we avoid being doomed by fights against 'windmills'.

We can shake our symptomatic alienated inner undergrowth and beat fascism this way.

We cannot beat fascism by repressing ourselves or trying to dial back the time.

We cannot beat fascism with another search for purity.

We can find an empowering, innervating form of perceiving our world full of shocks and full of alienation.

"Innervation" is a reception of the external world, that is empowering, she writes.

Innervative perception is in contrast to a defensive adaptation that protects at the price of paralyzing, writes Buck-Morss.

Defensive adaptation rejects tech & protects against fascism too little as it is paralyzing by repressing the drive towards tech that cannot be repressed.

Today, the instruments of labour employ us, not us employing them.

"Every kind of capitalist production has this in common that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labor, but the instruments of labor that employ the workman," she writes.

Employing the instruments of labour ourselves would be enervating.

"In the factory system this acquires palpable reality, the argument goes," writes Buck-Morss.

Our senses are deformed by capitalism.

Marx notes: "The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present."

"Overstimulation and numbness is characteristic of the new synaesthetic organization as anaesthetics," she writes.

"The technical apparatus of the camera is incapable of returning our gaze," Buck-Morss writes.

The deadness of the eyes confront the camera's machine-eyes that lost their ability to look, she writes.

"Of course, the eyes still see. Bombarded with fragmentary impressions they see too much—and register nothing".

"Aesthetics changes from a cognitive mode of being "in touch" with reality to a way of blocking out reality":

This "destroys the human organism's power to respond politically even when self-preservation is at stake," writes Buck-Morss.

Someone past experiencing is no longer capable of telling proven friend from mortal enemy, writes Buck-Morss.

An appearance of reality tricks the senses through technical manipulation.

Phones & Fascism:

Sensory addiction to a compensatory reality becomes a means of social control.

Technologies multiplied the potential for phantasmagoric effects.

The bourgeois interiors of the nineteenth century provided a phantasmagoria of textures & sensual pleasure that immersed the home-dweller in a total environment, a privatized fantasy world, writes Buck-Morss.

A privatized fantasy world protects the senses & sensibilities of the ruling class, argues Walter Benjamin.

Benjamin documents the phantasmagoric Paris shopping arcades, where the rows of shop windows engulfed the viewer in a simulated total environment-in-miniature, writes Buck-Morss.

World Fairs expanded phantasmagoria to the size of small cities, she writes.

In the tourist bubble the traveler's

"experiences" are all monitored & controlled in advance, she writes.

In the tourist bubble, we all see the same altered world & experience the same total environment, she writes.

Unlike with drugs, phantasmagoria takes the position of objective fact, she writes.

The intoxication of phantasmagoria becomes the social norm, writes Buck-Morss.

"Under these conditions, the definition of "art" as a sensual experience that distinguishes itself precisely by its separation from "reality" becomes difficult to sustain," she writes.

"Much of

"art" enters into the phantasmagoric field as entertainment, as part of the commodity world," she writes.

"Marx made the term phantasmagoria famous, using it to describe the world of commodities":

Goods in their mere visible presence, conceal every trace of the labor that produced them, she writes.

Commodities veil the production process, and

encourage to confuse reality with subjective fantasies and dreams, she writes.

Adorno comments on commodities that their phantasmagoria "mirrors subjectivity by confronting the subject with the product of its own labor".

The labor that has gone into the product is no longer identifiable & the dreamer encounters its "own image impotently,"

argues Adorno.

Protest becomes an empty "subjective expression that is nullified by its very vehemence," writes Buck-Morss.

Wagnerian agonism idolizes the fake rebel just as music still does today.

"The task of Wagner's music is to hide the alienation and fragmentation, the loneliness and the sensual impoverishment of modern existence that was the material out of which it is composed," she writes.

The spectacle of everybody seeing themselves as rebel while being capitalist subjects helps us see ourselves as still human.

Thingification means simply that capitalism turns everything into a thing measured by its capitalist value.

Thingification is referred to by Buck-Morss as reification. In German it is called Ver-ding-lichung.

This German word could also be translated as Thingify-ation. Ding means thing.

Our alienated hardship is covered over by Wagner, warming up the alienated relations & making them sound as if our lives are still very human, she writes. Wagner warms up the alienated and reified relations of humans and makes them sound as if they were still human.

Wagner speaks of "healing up the wounds with which the anatomical scalpel has gashed the body of speech"

It is not about denouncing Wagner.

People were falling for not simply a strongman but a redeemer-like figure.

Hitler promiseds to redeem with his baby-like expressions of aggression, lack & anxiety.

They appealed under degradations of capitalism.

In times where people feel degraded, the machine is elevated into the redeemer too.

And war is glorified as a redeeming triumph of humans over the degrading machine which humans at the same time fear and seek.

The "hail Hitler" is an aesthetics of the masses wanting to be shaped like a machine to triumph over the machine.

The masses where promised to be shaped together while also promised to each of them be safe and exempted in an impossible way that ended badly for all.

Wagner's staging of the chorus anticipates the crowd's salute to Hitler, writes Buck-Morss.

Capital helps Fascism to use war to justify its injustice.

Our crisis in cognitive experience is caused by the alienation of the senses, she writes.

The alienation of our senses makes it possible for humanity to view our own destruction with enjoyment, writes Buck-Morss.

There is a moment when we as infants triumphantly recognize our mirror image, and identify with it as an imaginary bodily unity.

Lacan's theory of the "mirror stage" describes this moment of a seeming unity that is not there.

This narcissistic sense of the self in the mirror is a misrecognition, she writes.

The subject identifies with the image as the "form" of the ego, in a way that conceals its own lack, writes Buck-Morss.

Thus the significance of Lacan's mirror theory emerges in the context of modernity as experience of the fragile body & the dangers to it of fragmentation, she writes.

The mirror stage can be read as a theory of fascism, writes Buck-Morss.

Fascism is a displacement of the place of pain.

Fascism is a consequent mis(re)cognition:

"The mass-as-

audience remains somehow undisturbed by the spectacle of its own manipulation," she writes.

It was the genius of fascist propaganda to give to the masses a double role, to be observer as well as the inert mass being formed & shaped.

Riefenstahl's film, Triumph of the Will, lets the viewer forget the purpose of militarization, she writes.

The mobilized masses fill the grounds of the stadium & the cinema screen, the surface patterns provide a pleasing design of the whole.

Fascism

anaesthetizes

cognitive

reception:

A viewing with disinterested pleasure of mobilized masses forgets: this scene prepares society for murder, she writes.

In Triumph of the Will, Rudolf Hess shouts out to the crowd:

"Germany is Hitler and Hitler is Germany!"

"The intentional meaning is that Hitler embodies the entire power of the German nation. But if we turn the camera on Hitler in a nonauratic" way, we see more, writes Buck-Morss.

In our own infancy, "for so many of us, the face of Hitler appeared as evil incarnate, the bogeyman of our own childhood fears," she writes.

"The narcissism that we have developed as adults, that functions as an anaesthetizing tactic against the shock of modern experience" "is the ground from which fascism can again push forth," she writes.

In shutting out the experience of the inhospitable, blinding age of big-scale industrialism, the eye perceives an experience of a complementary nature, in the form of its spontaneous after-image, argues Benjamin.

"Fascism is that afterimage. In its reflecting mirror we recognize ourselves," writes Buck-Morss.

Collapse is the strange attractor towards which we hurtle under the magnetism of fantasy.

Our reality is drawn towards collapse if left to its own fantasy frame.

Our alienation lets us experience planetary destruction as aesthetic pleasure.

Mankind’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction.

Our inner liberal has internalized so much.

Our inner liberal knows it has to become a collective being but it resists and is finding its own destruction aesthetic.

Notes

All direct and indirect quotes from:

Susan Buck-Morss. Aesthetics & Anaesthetics

"Drug addiction is characteristic of modernity. It is the correlate and counterpart of shock," writes Buck-Morss.

"Napoleon’s conquest has the happy effect of eliminating the mystification surrounding German particularity," writes Todd McGowan.

No longer defining myself through enemies does not announce the end of all conflict.

No longer defining myself through my enemies rather inscribes within the system itself the necessity of conflict.

McGowan writes:

"One’s particular is never as particular as one imagines it to be."

"The subject always proclaims its particularity from a universal position, though this position often remains mystified."

"when we take the whole of the capitalist system into account, the contradiction becomes necessary."

"If one bank doesn’t fail, others will."

"In this way, the absolute perspective reveals the deception inhering in the particular."

"When we reach the absolute, we have exhausted all possibilities for the elimination of contradiction."

"At this point we have nowhere else to go. We have come to contradiction in its most intractable form—the internal division within being itself."

"Absolute knowing affirms the necessity of a failure that occurs when the subject collides with the inevitability of contradiction."

"This is why one might rename absolute knowing the recognition of the inevitability of contradiction."

"While the white subject can have the illusory solace of an alignment between white particularity and the universal, the black subject inherently recognizes the alienation of particularity in the universal that produces singularity."

"Because he pays attention to both universality and its failure to accommodate black identity, Du Bois can articulate black singularity".

"Du Bois claims, “It is a peculiar sensation," "always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt & pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro;" "2 unreconciled strivings" "in 1 dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”"

"Du Bois doesn’t disdain the universal. He sees that the detour through universality is the only path to actual black singularity. The pure insistence on one’s own particularity leaves one stuck within an indeterminate diversity."

"Du Bois doesn’t content himself with black particularity in response to white oppression but instead has recourse to the universal."

"He recognizes that the same universality that shapes whites also shapes black subjects."

"the singular," "Hegel calls determinate universality."

Hegel insists on the absolute because he recognizes that we must think absolutely in order to arrive at the singular".

"attempting to isolate ourselves in our immediate particularity and refusing the universal is actually a way of missing the opening for singularity."

"the racist trap": "believing that the racial other somehow bypasses subjectivity and exists as a substantial entity, thereby harboring a secret knowledge."

"For Hegel, there is no substance, not even God, that avoids the self-division of the subject. Subjectivity is absolute."

"On the basis of the French Revolution alone, the ruling elite around the world could dismiss the assertion of freedom, equality, and solidarity as a contingent blip in human history."

"The Haitian Revolution forces everyone to reckon with these values as universal through its repetition of the French Revolution".

"Haiti is a genuine moment of the universal’s triumph, a moment when freedom and equality emerge as not simply particular European values but as universal ones."

"Hegel envisions how we should respond to the racism that locates the other’s otherness in the materiality of the body."

"Hegel’s failures occur not because of his investment in totalizing but at the moments when he betrays the absolute and falls back into a particularity replete with the rebarbative prejudices of his epoch".

"Inequality has its basis in the rejection of universality and the celebration of particular difference."

"Once one abandons the universal for the sake of the particular, one abandons the very terrain on which one might convince others to support one’s political program."

"When we refuse to think absolutely and remain content with some particularity, we create the space in which other particulars that want to impose themselves on the world can arise."

"The absolute idea reveals the lie at the heart of all such particulars and shatters their fantasy of triumphing over the trauma of contradiction."

"The risk of fascism doesn’t lie in the direction of the absolute but in the turn away from it."

"The path to universal freedom lies through thinking absolutely."

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All quotes from Emancipation After Hegel

"The ultimate end point of the logic of particular difference is the death camp."

Todd McGowan writes:

"the opposing particular, Jew, is the one that comes to act as universal because it provides the basis through which one can identify oneself as a German."

"The oppressed group in a struggle of competing particulars will always represent the universal, even as it is degraded by the oppressor."

"Nazism thus exemplifies the logic of the particular and reveals where it always leads."

"In attempting to affirm the particularity of German identity, Nazism" paints "the Jew as the universal against which this identity must define itself."

"The more Nazism" paints "the threat that Jews pose to German identity, the more this identity depends on the Jew as universal, which is why Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg labels Jewishness an “anti-race” without any particularity of its own."

"Nazi identity depends on the universality of the Jew, but this dependence only augments Nazi hatred."

"The ultimate end point of the logic of particular difference is the death camp."

"In order to sustain itself as a particular, the German requires the Jew to function as the universal that gives an identity to its particularity."

"As a consequence, Nazi Germany cannot eliminate the Jewish menace without destroying the basis of its own particularity, which is what it seeks to affirm through the annihilation."

"Nazism is an impossible project. It is" "logically doomed to failure."

"it is actually the absolute that arms us to struggle against Nazism in all its guises."

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All quotes from Emancipation After Hegel

By “the German” he means not all Germans but German socialization under the Nazis.

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How we are so resilient: We are tired, but somehow "Palestine Will Be Free" has this unending force within us.

Our freedom struggle is held up by a deeper "reason" that lifts us up like an inner freedom.

Defending Hegel's "reason" against Staatsräson.

The Palestine movement is free in an unfree world, claiming its own authority rather than only making demands on authority.

The global Palestine movement is about a genocidal structure. A sign of true agency, which Hegel calls "reason".

It is resilient & cunning for it is on the side of what Hegel meant by "reason".

Aiming at deeper structural injustes, the movement is not neurotically oppositional.

The Palestine movement pushes for an honest system rather than in a way still identifying with those it opposes.

The Palestine movement is more free than those who could afford not to toe the line but who avoid freedom by keeping silent even to themselves.

The unfree subject is more or less unable to experience limits "as a sign of its own freedom, not as an constraint imposed externally," argues Todd McGowan.

McGowan writes:

'Though resistance to oppressive structures is always necessary, it cannot be the last word if we want to be free"

"The attempt to cling to negativity and conceive freedom in opposition produces a hysterical subject, a subject incapable of seeing how its rebellion actually feeds the authority that it challenges."

"Hegel takes reason as the site where freedom manifests itself."

"Rather than simply negating the external world and defining itself in opposition to it, reason authorizes the form that the world takes."

"It finds its freedom there in the midst of that form."

"the revolution of Kantian morality is that it locates freedom within the law rather than in the law’s abeyance."

"In the act of giving itself a moral law, the subject declares its freedom either to obey this law or not to."

"Hegel recognizes that the decisive step forward that Kant makes lies in linking morality to freedom rather than to constraint, which is how we typically conceive morality"

"Kant's conception of the moral law as what the subject ought to do rather than what the subject already does marks his fundamental misstep."

"By aligning his philosophical position with the ought (Sollen), Kant distances himself from moral success."

"striving after the good replaces the act. Kantian and Fichtean subjects avoid acting, according to Hegel, because when they do “they enter the sphere of limitedness. They foresee this and therefore fear every contact, remain enclosed within themselves""

"Kant and Fichte’s version of morality is that of the rebel."

"Though they align morality with the law rather than with its transgression, they fail to take this alignment far enough."

"Hegel pushes it a step further. By identifying ourselves with the achievement of the moral law rather than striving to achieve it, we reveal that freedom is not the absence of limitation but the encounter with an internal limitation that drives us to act."

"Though one can assert one’s freedom in standing up to an oppressive regime like Malcolm X or Sophie Scholl, one can also do so every time that one acts without any external guarantee for the act."

"This is why crime is inherently unfree. It treats the law as an external force that it can transgress."

"The unfree subject constantly experiences its obedience as a constraint that it would like to do away with."

"Freedom is the recognition that the subject is the source of its own opposition, that its negation does not rely on any external authority but involves instead its own self-relation."

"Of course, the subject must negate external figures of authority in order to discover its own freedom, but negation is also a self-relation that these external negations obscure."

"Once one conceives of the opposition as internal, one recognizes the essence of freedom."

"As Hegel puts it in the Science of Logic, “the idea, because of the freedom which the concept has attained in it, also has the most stubborn opposition within it; its repose consists in the assurance and the certainty with which it eternally generates that opposition and eternally overcomes it, and in it rejoins itself"."

Reason is Hegel's word for how we can find a resilient freedom under oppression.

Staatsräson is a perversion of reason. A reason that admits that it is forced upon people.

The German Staatsräson regime may be held together by the illusion that it is enlightened enough to be a little less reasonable and a bit more oppressive.

But it is a thin line towards a system completely discrediting itself to itself.

NOTES

Quoting from:

Todd McGowan. Emancipation after Hegel

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AS PURELY PRIVATE BEINGS WE FALL FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT US TO NOT LOOK UP. AND WHO ENJOY THROUGH IDENTITY BY EXCLUSION.

WHEN SUBJECTS VIEW THEMSELVES AS PRIVATE "THEY OPEN THEMSELVES TO THE APPEAL OF THE AUTHORITARIAN LEADER,' WRITES MCGOWAN.

AS PURELY PRIVATE BEINGS WE FALL FOR AUTHORITARIANS AS WE UNLEARN TO ENJOY WITH OTHERS BUT ENJOY AGAINST THEM.

WE TODAY ENJOY AGAINST OTHERS THROUGH THEM, NOT WITH THEM.

MANUFECTURING ISOLATION:

WE ENJOY ONLY BY BEING AGAINST OTHERS WHERE SYSTEMIC ISOLATION MAKES US WEIRD.

Weird in the sense of sacrificial:

Sacrifice for the other blinds us to our own dissatisfaction says Lacan.

Sacrifice functions to support our idea that there is an other, a real cause, beyond any human other and any profane cause.

THE RIGHT ONLY THINKS IT IS RADICAL.

TACKLING PROBLEMS NOT AT THEIR RADICAL ROOT MAKES THE RIGHT ALL THE MORE VIOLENT.

THE RIGHT NEEDS ITS FAKE PROBLEMS IN ORDER TO NOT LOOK UP AT THE REAL STRUGGLES.

NOT LOOKING UP AT THE TRUE PROBLEMS MEANS THAT YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU WANT POLITICALLY.

THE RIGHT IS A SYMPTOM OF NOT KNOWING ENOUGH WHAT WE WANT.

HISTORY IS SHAPED BY THE RIGHT WHEN WE SEEK IDEOLOGY IN ORDER TO TAKE CONSISTENCY FOR OUR BEING FROM IT.

IN SUBMITTING TO A FAKE CAUSE WE SEEK CONSISTENCY FOR OUR BEING, WE SEEK A GUARANTEE TO OUR BEING.

WE SEEK A PLACE GRANTED TO US IN THE GREAT SCHEME OF THINGS WHEN THERE IS ONLY UNCERTAINTY.

WITHOUT THE IMMIGRANT TO DETERMINE WHAT AMERICA SIGNIFIES, THE APPEAL FOR AMERICAN GREATNESS FALLS ON DEAF EARS, SO TRUMP PROCLAIMED TO BUILD A WALL, WRITES MCGOWAN.

A COUNTER-ENJOYMENT WOULD HAVE TO HAVE ALSO AN EDGE.

BUT NOT ACHIEVED BY PAINTING ENEMIES BUT BY TARRYING WITH THE NEGATIVITY OF THE SYSTEM ITSELF.

MAGA IS "DON'T LOOK UP":

MAGA IN ORDER TO PUNCH ONLY DOWNWARDS NEEDS TO MAKE US NOT LOOK UP AT THE TRUE ISSUES.

The right wins with its exclusive belonging only for some.

The right uses the disruptiveness of enjoyment to further a sense of an exclusive belonging only for some.

BY BOOSTING RACISM TO JUSTIFY EXPLOITATION, CAPITALISM DESTROYS OUR CORE HUMAN SUBSTANCE.

IN RACISM WE AVOID TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR WHAT GOES ON NOT IN OTHERS BUT IN US.

WE ARE SO UNABLE TO LOOK AT OUR RACISM: FOR RACISM IS THE ULTIMATE "DON’T LOOK UP". (UP AT THE ROOT ISSUES)

Capitalism is destroying our shared symbolic substance by imposing a compulsion to blame someone.

ANTISEMITISM IS A FORM OF DON’T LOOK UP:

Anti-Semitism paints a figure as the cause of social antagonisms.

Crucially the antagonisms are actually engendered by capitalism, not by the blamed targets.

ANTISEMITISM OFFERS THE ENJOYMENT OF FALSE ANSWERS THAT ARE EASIER TO MAKE ENJOYABLE THAN LOOKING UP.

ONE FALSE ANSWER IS THAT OUR LACK CAN BE OVERCOME, THAT SOCIAL HARMONY IS POSSIBLE.

The fascist leader appears in the false promise of social harmony.

Fascism tries to have entities appear as opposites as if the conflict between them will get rid of deeper contradiction and antagonism.

The ultimate rightist fantasy is the elimination of contradiction.

Fascism sees its salvation in organizing the masses without affecting the unjust property structure the people hoped to bring down, writes Walter Benjamin.

BUT THE OPPRESSIVE ORDER IS FORCED TO PUT ITSELF ON THE LINE.

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We lack the convincing edge where our 'We' didn't mean everyone.

The right makes use of the smallmindedness that comes with hypochracy.

Defensive democracy as merely bourgeois talk about fascism does not work, writes Strick.

The attitude with which many of us speak up for democracy does not address the desire for the right

Normalizing an emotional structure of disgust helped the right.

Normalized emotional bias provided the centre and the right with a structure of desire they have in common.

It is an emotional politics of biased disgust that the right and the centre have in common.

Right feelings no longer appear irrational to many.

Effective counter-proposals can be developed if we say goodbye to normality, writes Strick.

Right-wingers are not the opposite of this democracy, but one of its contemporary expressions. Its actors are white and men, writes Strick.

The right agitates against today’s complex society & occupies society’s risk discourses, writes Strick.

Reflexive fascism not only shows Hitler salutes but turns them into popular culture and into an empowerment for some of the non-excluded, writes Strick.

Reflexive fascism writes and murders again and it feels (again) like liberation for some, writes Strick.

The reflexiveness of the right, its way of becoming part of the mainstream, works hand in hand with the automatisms that maintain the social fiction of normality, writes Strick.

Reflexive fascism mercilessly exploits the emotional voids and contradictions.

Normality is thanking fascism in reflexive cloths for the desire it expresses, writes Strick.

It is important to offer different versions of normality than those offered in the mainstream media, writes Strick.

The desire for stories of connection is central, because it can replace the omnipresent desire for the right, writes Strick.

Against an alternative right, what is needed is not ›more normality‹ but a counterfeeling rooted in a politics not designed to betray.

Clinton had half of Trump's supporters described as a basket of deplorables.

Her comment initiated the collapse of an entire society, writes Strick.

Those addressed printed T-shirts with the inscription I am a deplorable and won the emotional, metapolitical battle.

To date, the connection has only been partially understood, writes Strick.

The mistake was this: They are stupid racists and so on, we are not. But who or what are we? An answer must come, because the alternative right communicates its answers with great efficiency and speed, writes Strick.

You need different ways of dealing with fascism.

One, for example, was found by Saxony's Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer, who asked those gathered at a community meeting after the Chemnitz riots in 2018:

Are we in agreement that the Hitler salute is not okay?

With some grumbling this minimum standard was accepted.

The anecdote forces at least one insight: large parts of the so-called normality, which automatically demarcates itself from fascism, have to be renegotiated.

The difference between democracy and fascism has become fragile in many ways.

Why is fascism attractive to people online? Answering this better requires ways of speaking that do not just rely on the rhetoric of suspicion and convicting.

Many right-wingers feel democratic in their own eyes, writes Strick.

Many right-wingers formulate their projects of devaluation as struggles for transformation, writes Strick.

Many right-wingers position themselves not only as producers of fear, but as makers of optimism for alternatives, warns Strick.

Right-wing feelings often determine the climate of discourse, writes Strick.

Back rooms have become massive counter-publics, writes Strick.

The core business of the right is the production of self-esteem, writes Strick.

THE RIGHT PRODUCES FEELINGS EASILY WHEN THE LEFT BELIEVES ITSELF TO BE ALL RATIONAL.

THE INSTITUTIONAL LEFT DOESN’T PRODUCE FEELINGS BECAUSE ITS "WE" IS HOLLOW.

Against the right, what is needed is not ‘more normality’, but real counter-enjoyments based on avowing that we are in battle.

THE RIGHT PRODUCES FEELINGS IN SEEMING UNITED.

TRUE LEFT IDEAS CAN UNITE.

A TRUE LEFT COULD USE THE EDGE OF A SPIRIT THAT UNITED US TO THE POINT OF BEING A THREAT TO POWER.

We can do it, we can make immigration work, was a rare optimistic sentence from a German politician that wanted to create a sense of relief.

But the 'we' in the sentence did not mean everyone and those meant were not all the same.

Reflexive fascism has been growing on the fractures and ambiguities ever since, writes Strick.

This is the crux of the discourse of 'tolerance': it feels good, a feeling of euphoria in one's own openness, which almost always immediately leads to an exclusionary hardening of the 'we', writes Strick.

Tolerance done wrong

We need not simply inclusion but a we that works for all.

The narrowing of our ‘we’ as the tolerant group offers reflexive fascism a starting point, writes Strick.

Short-lived feelings of openness are not a sustainable emotional politics, writes Strick.

REFERENCES

Simon Strick: Rechte Gefühle

Paraphrased from German or direct and indirect quotes.

A big Thanks to my free & paid subscribers at https://enjoyments.substack.com

"Financial interests, ... are acknowledged and used in a way that shields capitalism’s very brutal reality, and the suspicion moves to science," "the conclusion becomes the nonexistence of climate change," writes Zupancic.

"The p*rvêrs€ syllogism goes as follows: everything in our social life is about money and financial interests," therefore science is wrong, "therefore there is no climate change," writes Zupancic.

"In the case of Covid," "a refusal to accept scientific facts, their denial, is just one of the forms taken by the disavowal of the truly traumatic dimension of capitalism," writes Zupancic.

"denial of climate change is a denunciation of capitalism by proxy, in much the same way that f€tIšhIśt disavowal is not a direct denial but a denial by proxy, denial delegated to the" F€TÎ$H, writes Zupancic.

"Pointing out ... people who profit ... is the means of ... disavowal, because it (re)directs our attention to subjective reasons (greed, enjoyment) and diverts us from the far more traumatic possibility of a greedy and self-enjoying a-subjective system of which no one is really or fully in control," writes Zupancic.

"Money has long since assumed the throne of social authority, and this is not meant in any moralist sense. Money did not replace symbolic authority; money is a symbolic authority," writes Zupancic.

Zupancic takes apart the claim that "the (corrupted) scientists... just blindly repeat what Power (politics, capital) wants them to say":

"This is a very typical confusion of the social authority of science and its scientific authority," counters Zupancic.

"While scientific authority (authority as scientific) is based on doubt, possible falsification, and constant interrogation, the social authority of science ... is much more akin to traditional authority in the sense of something that hinges on our (blind) belief and trust," writes Zupancic.

"The recent collapsing of the social authority of science can ... not be attributed simply to a rise of (obscurantist) beliefs," writes Zupancic.

Science's "social authority itself is based on something like an “obscurantist” belief (we trust science because it is science)," writes Zupancic.

"more and more people refuse to make the “leap of faith” when it comes to science," writes Zupancic.

"A crumbling of the social authority of science, a reluctance or straight-out refusal to trust it, is the cause of undermining (relativizing) its inherently scientific claims," writes Zupancic.

"key words that keep reemerging are “money” ... and “surveillance” (...directing our lives, for monetary or disciplinary purposes)". These "two words orchestrate the narratives of different conspiracy theories," but "it is only fair to say that what they evoke is not just a product of imagination but part and parcel of our social order," writes Zupancic.

"science is losing its social authority on account of its being an inherent and important part of the capitalist world order and its dynamics," writes Zupancic.

"money for research mostly comes not from the state (as representing public interest) but, rather, from private corporations pursuing private interests," writes Zupancic.

"It is precisely this capitalist dynamic that fuels (and often justifies) the mistrust in science, its disappearance as social authority. But this causality is not without an interesting twist," writes Zupancic.

"involvement in capitalist dynamics facilitates the denial of scientifically established facts," writes Zupancic.

"It is obviously true that the so-called green transition can bring huge profits to certain corporations, which in turn can actively direct and influence what is socially perceived as green," writes Zupancic.

"in whose interest is it to promote nuclear energy as the truly “green” alternative? There is clearly “money and power” behind," writes Zupancic.

"there is no way out of this possible suspicion within the existing economic order. Which is why this “no way out” often results in the conclusion that “there is no climate change,” since it’s all just about financial interests," writes Zupancic.

"it is not simply an obscurantist regression but a disavowal of the traumatic reality of capitalism," writes Zupancic.

Quoting from a lightly edited excerpt from Alenka Zupančič’s book Disavowal, https://www.e-flux.com/notes/615033/science-or-authority

Is our disavowal a libidinal reaction to not allowing negativity?

"Perverse disavowal is... an individual mass phenomenon. It is the pinnacle of individuality," writes Zupancic.

"Our enlightened Western leaders, who abhor ... ‘mass formations’, have only one response to them: to support and encourage individual levels of disavowal as a means of dealing with crises," writes Zupancic.

"This strategy worked for a while but is now failing dramatically because it presupposes a relatively stable social environment.... Not the kind of serial crisis we are being drawn into," writes Zupancic.

"The trick... is to avoid the condescending attitude of ‘understanding’ ... which denies the ‘people’ any agency ... while ‘we’ can rise above those circumstances and ‘understand’ those who cannot," writes Zupancic.

"As long as crisis is taken to mean ‘terrible events happening around us’ and our doing our best to cope with them, we remain trapped in the dialectic of repression and in the ... dance of denial and disavowal," writes Zupancic.

Seeing crisis as a continuous struggle takes away the need to disavow the crisis.

"What we really need to understand is" "that the other side of the crisis is a scene of continuous, ongoing struggle," writes Zupancic.

"If there is one lesson that social struggles can draw from psychoanalysis, it is": "there are only causes of what does not work, of what stumbles and points to a gap, a leap, a problem," writes Zupancic.

"If the ongoing struggle is the other side of crisis, recognizing this and joining the struggle could be an alternative kind of collective-

forming action," writes Zupancic.

"Joining the struggle does not mean surrendering to the immediacy of the movement that pulls you in," writes Zupancic.

"Also, it is not necessary to love your neighbour, or understand her, in order to join a common struggle," writes Zupancic.

"To loosen the grip of disavowal and conspiracy thinking, we might need to introduce some alienation and negativity," writes Zupancic.

"We are trained to jump up and scream at any sign of prejudice and immediately to disqualify people who in our view show any of these signs," writes Zupancic.

"To loosen the grip of disavowal and conspiracy thinking, we might need to introduce some alienation and negativity in the midst of all this immediacy," writes Zupancic.

"What is being repressed here is the repression, the negativity itself."

"The repression of the repression does not make the repression disappear; it only makes it more inaccessible," writes Zupancic.

"There is no way to face the trauma directly, and that is what makes it a trauma – something that consumes us and is indistinguishable from the effect it has on us," writes Zupancic.

"The more traumatic it is, the more numb we tend to become. We need to wake up – not to forget it ... but rather, to pursue the trauma and its consequences in the threads and cracks of our normal, everyday reality," writes Zupancic.

Seeing crisis as manifestation & truth of struggle takes away the compulsion to ignore the crisis.

Quoting from "Disavowal" by Alenka Zupancic, Polity Books, 2024

Alenka Zupancic wrote about our dark (hidden) enjoyments of crisis.

Is there a hidden sexual enjoyment in being passive in the face of crisis?

If sex can be a (hopless) defence against castration:

Is then knowledge about the climate crisis without us starting to act also a (hopeless) defence against a castrating crisis? 

In my fake avowal of how bad things are "I exercise my cognitive abilities, and abundantly so, in order not to think. I’m smarter than to think. I know better than to think. Knowledge as Fetish," writes Zupancic.

"Knowledge takes the structural place of the fetish as that via which we can keep doing, enjoying, or simply ignoring things that this knowledge would seem to contradict," writes Zupancic.

In today's twisted form of avowing that there is a crisis, "all that is important is that we ‘know all about it’, and that we are ‘nobody’s dupes’. This helps us efficiently to de-realize the reality," argues Zupancic.

Avowing our knowledge about the crisis that we are in blocks us where it is not really overcoming our general disavowal.

Fetishized knowledge disavows that we, in our avowal of crisis, still disavow.

Not being deceived, seeing the danger, but still not acting is a sign of fetishizing one's own knowledge of the crisis.

Knowledge that paralyzes is "sealing off the reality more completely, making it all the more inaccessible," writes Zupancic.

Paralyzing "knowledge itself starts to function as a fetish/object that makes it possible to disavow the disavowal itself," writes Zupancic.

"What (perverse) disavowal is actually about, and how it differs from simple repression or, for example, denial": 

"What is disavowed is not simply castration as such but the traumatic dimension (the real) of castration," writes Zupancic.

Avowing the 'castrating' crisis, but practically disavowing it, is a defence.

"Castration is used here as a defence against castration," writes Zupancic.

Is there a hidden quasi sexual enjoyment in being passive in the face of crisis?

"Perversion is never merely about the disavowal but about the enjoyment of the disavowal – or, more precisely, it is about the disavowal itself becoming the direct source of enjoyment," writes Zupancic.

"This is different from the classical structure of disavowal, where the primary aim remains to protect oneself from an unpleasant reality," writes Zupancic.

"The fetish allows us not only to ignore a certain reality but also to actively enjoy the tool of this ignoring, the fetish," writes Zupancic.

"The fetish acts as a (magical) device for regulating the relationship between desire and enjoyment in their dialectic of ‘castration’ (where desire is on the side of castration)," writes Zupancic.

"Perhaps in this case ‘disavowing castration’ means just that: not that  we do not believe in its existence or that we do not ‘accept’ it, but that we put it on our side, under our control, so that we can use it when necessary," writes Zupancic.

"Casanova is trying to make sure that these others enjoy their belief. He enjoys making others believe/enjoy (even if against their will), which is another trait of perversion: enjoyment of enjoyment, doubling of enjoyment, enjoyment in the knowledge of enjoyment," writes Zupancic.

"This enjoyment (and my knowledge about it) is also what calls into question the reality of castration (namely: if the other enjoys thanks to my machinations, he/she is not ‘castrated’; his/her castration is in my power, under my control, insofar as I can make sure that he/she enjoys)," writes Zupancic.

"Perversion is never merely about the disavowal but about the enjoyment of the disavowal – or, more precisely, it is about the disavowal itself becoming the direct source of enjoyment," writes Zupancic.

Quoting from "Disavowal" by Alenka Zupancic, Polity, 2024