*Differentiality: in it, the opposite of one term, of its presence,
is not immediately the other term but the absence
of the first term, the void at the place of its inscription (the void
which coincides with its place of inscription) and the presence of
the other, opposite, term fills out this void of the first term's absence.
*bodhisattva: he does represent Liberation, stepping out of the world of
illusion─but not immediately, like the Taoist sage; rather, he embodies
the very impossibility of the individual's immediate Liberation.
In opposition to other, ordinary human beings, Liberation (the passage
into Nirvana) is already present in him, but as a pure possibility
which must forever remain postponed.
*The correlate of One is not the Other but the void. . .the One
is already the unity of itself with its Other. . .If consequently,
the One is Something reflected-into-self, posited as its own ideal unity,
then the Void is precisely the reflection-into-self of the Otherness─
that is to say, a "pure" Otherness which is no longer Something-other.
*The key "reversal" of the dialectical process takes place when we recognize
in what at first appeared as a "condition of impossibility"─as a hindrance
to our full identity, to the realization of our potential─
the condition of the possibility of our ontological consistency.
*The problem for the signifier is not its impossibility to touch the Real
but its impossibility to "attain itself"─what the signifier lacks is not
the extra-linguistic object but the Signifier itself, a non-barred,
non-hindered One. Or, to but it in Hegelese: the signifier does not simply
miss the object, it always-already "goes wrong" in relation to itself,
and the object inscribes itself in the blank opened by this failure.
The very positivity of the object is nothing but a positivation,
an incarnation, of the bar which prevents the signifier from fully
"becoming itself". This is what Lacan means when he says that
"Woman doesn't exist": Woman qua object is nothing but the materialization
of a certain bar in the symbolic universe.
*The dual relationship of "knowledge" between "thought" and its "object"
is replaced by the triangle of (subjective) thought, the object and its notion
which in no way coincides with thought. We could say that Notion is the
form of thought. form in the strict dialectical sense of the "formal aspect"
qua truth of the content: the "unthought" of a thought is not some transcendent
content eluding its grasp but its form itself. The encounter between an object
and its Notion is for that reason necessarily a failed one: the object can
never fully correspond to its Notion since its very exisitence, its ontological
consistency, hangs on this non-correspondence. The "object" itself is in a
sense the incarnated non-truth: its inert presence fills out a hole in the
field of "truth", which is why the passage to the "truth" of an object entails
its loss, the dissolution of its ontological consistency.
*The very experience of a ""traumatic loss" of an idyllic fulness conceals
the fact that this state of fullness never existed in the first place─
that is "comes to be only through being left behind". Hegel says this
explicitly in his lectures on the philosophy of religion: "Paradise" is
strictly correlative to man's Fall, it is a retroactive projection.
a way man (mis)perceives the previous, animal state.
*as fantasyformations
filling out the gap, the radical discontinuity between the
two perspectives (the “forward view” which perceives the situation as
“open” and the “backward view” which perceives the past course of
events as causally determined). The two perspectives can never be
fully synchronized, since the gap separating them is another name for
the subject. One cannot reduce one perspective to another by claiming,
for example, that the “true” picture is that of necessity discovered by
the “backward view”, that freedom isjust an illusion of the immediate
agents who overlook how their activity is a mere wheel within the
large causal mechanism; or, conversely, by embracing a kind of
Sartreian existentialist perspective and affirming the subject’s ultimate
autonomy and freedom, conceiving the appearance of determinism as
the later “pratico-inert” objectivization of the subject’s spontaneous
praxis. If we proceed in this way, we retain the ontological unity of the
universe, whether in the form of substantial necessity pulling the
strings behind the subject’s back or in the form of the subject’s
autonomous activity “objectivizing” itself in the substantial unity -
what gets lost in both cases is the subject in the Lacanian sense which is
not an autonomous power “positing” the substance but precisely a
name for the gap within substance, for the discontinuity which
prevents us from conceiving the substance as a self-contained totality.
*The crucial point not to be missed here is that culture and barbarism do not
exclude each other: the opposite o f barbarism is not culture but civilization
(i.e. “non-civilized”equals “barbaric”); in other words, culture in itself,
in so far as it is affirmed in its opposition to civilization, sets free an
unmistakable barbaric potential - it was already
Hegel who, apropos o f the medieval culture o f alienation, spoke o f the “
barbarism o f pure culture” [Barbarismus der reinen Kultur]. The fact that
the greatest barbarism o f our century (Nazism) took place within the nation
which glorified its culture against the superficial civilization o f its
neighbours (Germany) is by no means accidental: there is
ultimately no contradiction between Heinrich Heydrich, who directed the Nazi
terror in occupied Bohemia and planned the “final solution” o f the Jewish
question, and the same Heydrich who, in the evening after the hard day’s work,
played with friends Beethoven’s string quartets, perhaps the supreme
achievement o f German culture. The first model o f this
German Kulturbarbarismus is Luther, whose Protestant refusal o f
Rome presents a reaction o f pure, inner culture against the worldly Catholic
civilization, and at the same time, by means o f its savage, violent attitude,
displays the latent barbarism proper to the German ideology.
*We elude the inherent impossibility of the sexual relationship by positing an
external hindrance to it, thus preserving the illusion that without this
hindrance, we would be able to enjoy it fully. . .
The so-called “normal” resolution of the Oedipus complex -
the symbolic identification with the paternal metaphor: that is to say,
with the agency of prohibition - is ultimately nothing but a way for the
subject to avoid the impasse constitutive of desire by transforming the
inherent impossibility of its satisfaction into prohibition.