The athletic and evocative LarvalSubjects blog currently features a discussion on the aims of and possibilities of reflexivity for philosophy / critique: here and here. I’d like to wager a modest contribution in the form of a mutant Kierkegaardian-Foucaultian model. As such, shall we start with Zizek?
Somewhere in the vast archives of culture jamming extraordinaire Slavoj Zizek lies a claim to the effect that the Kierkegaardian triad, aesthetic-ethical-religious, is transposed in Lacan’s imaginary-symbolic-real knot. The consequences of this might be that the fundamental question – the parallactic question of Passage – is similarly a transposition of Kierkegaard’s fundamental question: Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical? That is, our (critical) question would be: Is there a teleological suspension of the symbolic?
It appears quite impossible. Any true rupture with the symbolic order would seem to merely institute a new symbolism, as it were, a new regime of signs. This is a question of some considerable dialogue – it is present in Freud as in Lacan, in Benjamin as in Adorno. But isn’t this impossibility precisely the “aim” or telos of philosophy as critique? This would be the impossibility of freedom, a freedom that must first be recognized as a new symbolic mediation. Freedom can, from the immersed perspective of critique, only be given as that which is not given in the symbolic. Freedom is the unpresented in presentation, the void of the situation. Subtractive freedom.
How can the symbolic be suspended, teleologically? We have many names for this most romantic figure of latter day anti-romanticisms: care of the self, celebration of awareness, traversing the fantasy (in a sense), pure Act, occupation without counting, subtraction, to skim the surface of popular alternatives. We might follow Foucault, in his lecture series on the Hermeneutics of the Subject as he painstakingly develops his notion of care of the self, to be assembled in the third volume of The History of Sexuality.
Foucault effectively claims that the teleological suspension of the symbolic can be accomplished through a set of self-displacing practices known to the ancients as epimeleia heautou, broader in scope and efficacy than gnothi seauton (and not, for that, the very same set of practices, which would be not only undesirable but impossible). Foucault says: “Attending to the self is not…just a brief preparation for life; it is a form of life,” exactly the form-of-life Agamben thematizes throughout his work on politics (the zoe that is its own bios, life that refuses separation from what it can do). This extends to (critical) pedagogy, the truest form of which would probably look something like Deleuze’s paideia or apprenticeship. For Foucault, care of the self involves a certain experimentalism, a ceaseless intensification of life, becoming a body without organs in the throes of individuation. Recall that Deleuze, for instance, celebrates the suspension of individuation we witness in the close-up in cinema – suspension here in the sense of prolongation, moving to the edge of the void without allowing the schizophrenizing-intensifying processes to bring about a collapse of cognizance, but rather to cause an excess of cognizance, a hyper-perception. This would be freedom. Philosophy requires a perpetuality of movement, an utterly ceaseless subjectification/desubjectification circuit. This is not a “leap out” of the dominant symbolic-ideological discourse. This is a productive reconfiguration of the symbolically determined structures of subjectivity, a discernment (hence “hyper-perception”) of the virtualities / potentialities available for actualization in any given social formation. “Leaping out” is impossible – it is a negation. Freedom must be produced, and produced through adjustments to the assemblage – hence my blog’s subtitle.
