Why Lacan Is Full of Poopy

26 Feb, 2025

Download PDF version here: https://files.catbox.moe/p77dbw.pdf

Listen to Video version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b7L7jzEEco

                Words

Gallery

Lady of all the art pieces

Maidens together doing puzzle matches

Labor union conundrum aligns

Birth combination problem

Unborn

Life begins under

Growing trees from Australia

Kangaroos, Koalas, expanding cells sold

Pouches, leaves, prison accumulates money

Green

Envy limes

Eyes fruitful and sour

Faces multiply addition subtraction

Noses exponential positive over negative

Nerd

                The Imaginary’s Potential

“The teaching of this seminar is designed to maintain that imaginary effects, far from representing the core of analytic experience, give us nothing of any consistency unless they are related to the symbolic chain that binds and orients them.” (Lacan, 2006) pg. 6

Images. Images are the little pieces which comprise the manifold of objectified intelligible consciousness. Little shards of actuality in inertia (Lacan, 2006) pg. 6 to be arranged by Symbolic laws which can be ruptured by the Real. Yet there is a shadow cast from these bits of fantasy, one projecting from the light of time which falls back into the very shadows tracing from the image’s feet. Every image falls into its own shadow in time, enlightening its last shadow into its reincarnation and that image’s shadow into a new silhouette that this shadow too will fall into as the first shadow ascends into a sun retaining an anamnesic continuity of the image. An imaginary flow of time preserved by every image descending into its depths. What is this shadow of the image? The philosopher Edmund Husserl has an answer: “every actuality involves its potentialities” (Husserl, 1960) pg. 44 he states bluntly, the shadow side of every image that time drags her yonder ancestor down into the depths of what could be thus… To Husserl for an image to be in time is for it to constantly fall into what it could be, perish and become a new could be to illuminate and guide the image’s shadow for their next fall into the pit of time. Husserl calls this pit of time the “horizon”. (Husserl, 1960) pg. 44

However, is this descent to the shadow of the “horizon” merely a “fall” or is it more accurately stated as a dive? For Husserl we ourselves “vary the perceptual object” to the point we are “abstaining from acceptance of its being” for “we change the fact of this perception into a pure possibility”. (Husserl, 1960) pg.70 In other words an image is not a mere piece on a board but a whole depth and sea of possibility to be plunged and explored into in its own right. This perspective of the image as its own space of “pure possibility” puts into question the narrative of the Symbolic order merely regulating static facts. The image having its own autonomy, life, and flow of movement should not be thought of as guided from without by a demiurge but from within the limits of its own space of distortion and movement. Symbolic order(s) are but one trajectory an image may follow in its own passing through toward its horizon of time, and that is a trajectory, the path of a verb, a way a space of possibility moves with its own imaginary eidetic matter. Should ruptures then be thought to come from an aleatory encounter with The Real, or the image’s own self displacement by the principle of its own power of variation? The imaginary’s own power onto itself of pushing itself against its own limits, rather than simply riding the Symbolic order’s trajectory like a festival attraction that occasionally breaks down due to the Real. This limit moreover is pushed even farther in human beings where in Husserl’s understanding we have the power to pair up our own image of ourselves with another’s and thus take on the limits of another person’s potential as our own and visa versa. As Husserl states: “as the outward conduct of someone who is angry or cheerful, which I easily understand from my own conduct under similar circumstances. Higher psychic occurrences, diverse as they are familiar as they have become, have furthermore their style of synthetic interconnexions and take their course in forms of their own, which I can understand associatively on the basis of my empirical familiarity with the style of my own life, as exemplifying roughly differentiated typical forms. In this sphere, moreover, every successful understanding of what occurs in others has the effect of opening up new associations and new possibilities of understanding; and conversely, since every pairing association is reciprocal, every such understanding uncovers my own psychic life in its similarity and difference and, by bringing new features into prominence, makes it fruitful for new associations.” - (Husserl, 1960) pg. 120

Thus the image does not just stretch of its own account, but of its constant dialogue with other images stretching and discovering new potentials as time moves forward and we swim into their shadowy depths. Imagining the rock as a chair changes the potential of what both can be. For Lacan a soldier on a battlefield or politician in the heat of the debate would have their plan of action subordinated to the outline of their order or their script despite the real contingencies that a lived encounter would push those in struggle to deal with. In situations of lived struggle imagination comes onto the seen the second when the soldier or interlocutor is forced to go off the blueprint of symbolic ideation and test the limits of their own imagination’s potential in the real exchange between their comrades and their enemies’ potential. In fact the soldier who can only stick to the plan despite any contingencies or surprises are the ones likely to be ensnared by the very trap the enemy laid out for them in the first place. But the limits of potential are not merely a spontaneous reaction of “the Real” but the very strategic depths of the soldier reflecting on their own material potentiality. The potential of a soldier is both more than the rules put on him by a commander or the ruptures reacted to in the enemy, for it has its own dynamic space of play to be used in its own right.

Lacan critiques “imaginary” identification with another person in Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” as being insufficient compared to an identification with “reasoning” which Lacan relegates to the symbolic order. (Lacan, 2006) pg.44 This however identifies the imaginary with just the actuality of the person’s image and not that image’s potentiality which masters not just a following of the Symbolic order with its movement but also unseen depths of possibility that Lacan would in his jargon more likely identify with the Real. However, these subordinations of the image to what it can do, rather than what it can do to the autonomy of imagination are already reifying archetypes of the image’s own autonomy and real relationship with other monadic images into some sort of spectral top-down imposition above any of the image’s own communal activity. And this marks the first umbrage I shall take with Lacan, the subordination of the image to its effects. We will later see that the whole tripartite schema he establishes on stagnating and homogenizing its elements into a transcendental skeleton. My essays will aim to put the flesh, blood, and life back onto this skeleton and subordinate it to the movement of a living whole which bends even the solid image of the bones to its knees…

References

Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian Meditations An Introduction to Phenomenology . (D. Cairns, Trans.) The Hague, Netherlands: Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.

Lacan, J. (2006). The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

                Embedded

Fins which are caught on bottles

Crooked fish of plastic and lead

Bullets to dreams off balance

Sleeping switch down

Falling eyes darting around

Hitting the target of pupil depths

Black tar circle peace

Oil company diplomacy

Capitalists get together across nations

Cathedral communion

Little crackers for the Pope

Against the backs of eight

Little to eat left behind

Western mouse

Rodent

                Absolute Joy


                Against


                Symbolic Subordination 

“A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” – (Nietzsche 1873)

Lacan’s symbolic order is both law and other, as law it is evaluation and recursion and as other it is the empty form of discourse itself. I find it puzzling then how this is an “other” then in any real sense given my own intuitive experience with language. Language seems to be a path which recurs the ego by its metonymic identity to itself that displaces only to recuperate yourself in an association. Indeed, words merely interpreted by rules rather than the presence that contextualizes it is simply interpreting others due to your own habituations of language rather than surrendering the ownership (Levinas 1991 pg. 209) of language to the spontaneity of the other (in a different than Lacanian sense) to give it objectivity. Words which are not said are not said as verbs (sayings) but are rather utter subjectively sterile saids. (Levinas 1994 pg 5) Understanding words is based on value in the sphere of memory and reflection (the sphere of the self) in the representational register which does not let time pass. Being forgotten for the sake of a tabula rasa, the metaphorical aspect of language is the egoism of the gap between “a meaning and a non-meaning” (Lacan 2006 pg. 423) that affirms a will to power or concluding judgment in a Nietzschean sense with an ordered rank that the interlocutor reacts to against the speaker as an active force. But this is a worldly narcissism of value creation which rather than subordinate the speakers to objective rules instead names and asserts and it is only through the reactive perspective of ressentiment which denies the assertion of the self and inverts affirmative values through the moralism of “good and evil” that this narcissism is undermined in the name of otherworldly narcissism of the reactive herd:

“Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant Yes-saying to oneself slave morality from the start says No to an "outside," to a "different," to a "non-self": and this No is its creative deed. This reversal of the value-positing gaze-this necessary direction to the outside instead of back onto oneself-belongs to the very essence of ressentiment: in order to arise, slave morality always first needs an opposing and external world; physiologically speaking it needs external stimuli in order to act at all-its action is reaction from the ground up. The reverse is the case with the noble manner of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously, it only seeks its opposite in order to say Yes to itself more gratefully, more jubilantly- its negative concept "low," "base" and "bad" is only a late-born, pale and contrast­ing image compared with its positive basic concept, saturated through and through with life and passion: "We noble ones, we good, beautiful, happy ones!””-(Nietzsche 2014 pg. 229)

As a creative deed the no-saying and generation of the master’s or the world of now’s evil is metaphorical, a gap between a meaning and a non-meaning; yet this gap while a sea of ambiguous and generous depth in the active perspective is instead more a pit of a shadowy abyss for the reactive moralist which threatens to stare back at the soul and world that falls into the reactionary’s nihilistic game. Unlike the loving desire for adventurous and excessive ambiguity, the metaphor of the master challenges into the world; the metaphor of the slave is a box that says thou shall not, oh earthly desires thou shall not bring about heaven, oh master thou shall not fuck or dance or anything which I the reactionary cannot do. These metaphors of constraint ground the parasitic flow of the metonym which is endlessly reverberating hatred, in contrast to the masterly spirit which ejects the excess of love into the metaphor which metaphorizes their object as good and thus brings an excess of new possibilities. The masterly ownership is a releasing and generosity of spirit while the slavish ownership is an endless constricting of potentiality which haunts the world like a phantom in its despising of all affirmative and right on this earth and beyond. But even this hatred of affirmation is in a Levinasian perspective an acknowledgement of the other’s irreducibility. Hatred and the will to make the other suffer is not a mere objectification but an active desire for the other’s subjectivity so that the enemy of this “war” feels real suffering divorced from the social totality Lacan alludes to in a real human misery:

"In war beings refuse to belong to a totality, refuse community, refuse law; no frontier stops one being by another, nor defines them. They affirm themselves as transcending the totality, each identifying itself not by its place in the whole, but by its self. War presupposes the transcendence of the antagonist; it is waged against man. It is surrounded with honors and pays the last honors; it aims at a presence that comes always from elsewhere, a being that appears in a face. It is neither the hunt nor struggle with an element. The possibility, retained by the adversary, of thwarting the best laid calculations expresses the separation, the breach of totality, across which the adversaries approach one another. – (Levinas 1991 pg. 223)

(Levinas continues in another passage later in Totality and Infinity):

"The supreme ordeal of freedom is not death, but suffering. This is known very well in hatred, which seeks to grasp the ungraspable, to humiliate, from on high, through the suffering in which the Other exists as pure passivity. Hatred wills this passivity in the eminently active being that is to bear witness to it. Hatred does not always desire the death of the Other, or at least it desires the death of the Other only in inflicting this death as a supreme suffering. The one who hates seeks to be the cause of a suffering to which the despised being must be witness. To inflict suffering is not to reduce the Other to the rank of object, but on the contrary is to maintain him superbly in his subjectivity. In suffering the subject must know his reification, but in order to do so he must precisely remain a subject. Hatred wills both things. Whence the in-satiable character of hatred ; it is satisfied precisely when it is not satisfied, since the Other satisfies it only by becoming an object, but can never become object enough, since at the same time as his fall, his lucidity and witness are demanded. In this lies the logical absurdity of hatred." – (Levinas 1991 pg 239)

In contrast this subjectivizing of the other in the reactive morality of hatred and resentment, is the (not even) objectification of the active morality which simply ignores the other’s badness (which is merely an afterimage or effect of a failure to meet the active moralist’s affirmation) as an incidental pin prick at most. In fact, from an active perspective the adversary is not something to be hated but who’s subjectivity is something to even love as a true and respectable distinction:

“Not being able to take seriously for any length of time one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds-that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of plastic, reconstructive, healing and even forgetting­ inducing power (a good example of this in the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and churlish deeds committed against him and was not able to forgive only because he-forgot). Such a human being simply shakes off with a single shrug all manner of worms that dig deeply into others; here alone real " love of one's enemies" is also possible-assuming that it is possible at all on earth. How much respect for his enemies has a noble man! -and such respect is already a bridge to love . . . For he demands his enemy as his distinction, indeed he tolerates no other enemy than the one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! Now conversely imagine "the enemy" as the man of ressentiment conceives of him-and precisely here is his deed, his creation: he has conceived of "the evil enemy," "the evil one," and this in fact as a basic concept out of which he then thinks up a "good one" as an afterimage and counterpart-himself!”-(Nietzsche 2014 pg. 231)

The main failure of the Lacanian understanding of the symbolic order is that it presupposes the perspective of resignation and judgement into discourse and thus is based on reactive life hating value systems regardless of if seen from a Nietzschean narcissism or a Levinasian (I’d say real) otherness. It is as if Lacan had never even stopped to consider the joy of consumption and started from the perspective which comes later to surrendering consumption to the mastery of the future:

"Life is love of life, a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than my being: thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, working, warming oneself in the sun. Distinct from my substance but constituting it, these contents make up the worth [prix] of my life. When reduced to pure and naked existence, like the existence of the shades Ulysses visits in Hades, life dissolves into a shadow. Life is an existence that does not precede its essence. Its essence makes up its worth [prix] ; and here value [valeur] constitutes being. The reality of life is already on the level of happiness, and in this sense beyond ontology. Happiness is not an accident of being, since being is risked for happiness." – (Levinas 1991 pg.112)

(Levinas states in another section of Totality and Infinity)

"Possession is accomplished in taking-pos-session or Iabor, the destiny of the hand. The hand is the organ of grasping and taking, the first and blind grasping in the teeming mass: it relates· to me, to my egoist ends, things drawn from the element, which, beginningless and endless, bathes and inundates the separated being. But the hand relating the elemental to the finality of needs constitutes things only by separating its take from immediate enjoyment, depositing it in the dwelling, conferring on it the status of a possession. Labor is the very energy of acquisition. It would be impossible in a being that had no dwelling." –(Levinas 1991 pg. 159) The resignation of the this worldliness of the present has immense ethico-political consequences I will polemically and empirically demonstrate with utter contempt for any desire to defend the merit of resignation as anything other than hatred of selves, others, and ultimately a will to nothingness: "humanity would rather will nothingness than not will… (Nietzsche 2014 pg. 349)

                Genocide is a Symbolic Phenomenon 

“This "cosmic perspective" also grounds Mao's dismissive attitude towards the human costs of economic and political endeavors. If one is to believe Mao's latest biography, [11] he caused the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries: 38 million people were starved and slave-driven to death in 1958-61. Mao knew exactly what was happening, saying: "half of China may well have to die." This is instrumental attitude at its most radical: killing as part of a ruthless attempt to realize goal, reducing people to disposable means - and what one should bear in mind is that the Nazi holocaust was NOT the same: the killing of the Jews not part of a rational strategy, but a self-goal, a meticulously planned "irrational" excess (recall the deportation of the last Jews from Greek islands in 1944, just before the German retreat, or the massive use of trains for transporting Jews instead of war materials in 1944). This is why Heidegger is wrong when he reduces holocaust to the industrial production of corpses: it was NOT that, Stalinist Communism was that”. –Zizek from Marxist Lord of Misrule

To go straight to the darkest and most extreme example of the nihilism of the symbolic order let us talk about Nazis! First I will say it is too simple to see the reactivity of the Nazis as merely a twisted affirmation of German culture, (for example the German poet Hölderlin would have been exterminated for Schizophrenia and a great shard of German culture with him by the Nazis), but rather the nihilistic affirmation of purity itself, pure being (which from a Hegelian perspective is identical to nothingness a pure negation [Hegel 2010 pg. 58]) that’s march against the “impurity” of the other was more important to it than even its own “self” as Nazi Germany for the German war effort was sacrificed to the fires of the Holocaust in even a material sense.

The Stalinists in contrast to the Nazis do have a vision of the world that affirms (the collective farm construction in the name of socialism will be the example here), but instead of denying any individual other, their denial is of the omnipresence of history’s resistance to ideals itself. Thus, the vanishing of worlds, churches, and humans is a glorious progressive overcoming of this resistance from within the nation. A heat death which freezes all cultures into its silent eternity in the instrumentalized march of nihilistic technological labor:

"The old aul (fortified village of the Caucasus) is now breaking apart, it is moving toward settled life, toward the use of hay fields, toward land cultivation; it is moving from worse land to better land, to state farms, to industry, to collective farm construction." -—Filipp Goloshchyokin, First Secretary of the Kazakh Regional Committee of the Communist Party in the USSR, (Cameron 2018)

This breaking apart of the Kazakh aul from 1928 to 1933 required the closing of mosques, arresting of political and “class” leaders and the death of pastoral nomadism affirmed above resulted in a famine which exterminated 1.5 million Kazakhs, Ukrainians, and others in Kazakhstan making Kazakhs a minority in their own Soviet republic loosing around 38% of their population. Kazakhs who did not produce enough food for the state where denied the right to trade with other villages and at a local level food aid was not distributed to them at a high enough rate compared to Europeans in Kazakhstan for the same reason. Thousands of Kazakhs who tried to flee the famine to the border with China were shot on the spot by border guards who considered them “class enemies” and in one instance guards were found to of even raped the women and children trying to escape before killing them. Kazakhs which fled to other parts of the Soviet Union by contrast were considered vagrants, thieves and cannibals. The latter was somewhat true for some Kazakhs due to the fact the starvation became so severe in Kazakhstan Kazakhs were murdering each other for food to survive and even distributing human flesh on the black market. But as Timothy Snyder said of the Ukraine famine happening around the same time about this kind of situation:

“Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was "not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you." The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.”- (Snyder 2010 pg. 21-58)

Due to this resentment of the Kazakhs Soviet authorities deported them to cold, foodless, illness ridden train cars back to Kazakhstan along with non-refugee Kazakhs who were merely caught in the raids. 30% of those deported on the train cars died. When these Kazakhs arrived in Kazakhstan some were forced to work on collective farms where they were either fired or denied food rations for not working hard enough (due to the obvious fact they were literally starving to death and emaciated and thus well COULD NOT!) By the time the famine ended Soviet official would hold off food aid papers in their pocket while having parties instead of distributing to give food to starving Kazakhs. In some shreds of mercy by the Soviet state, 200,000 Kazakhs were vaccinated for famine related diseases to give the tiny amount of credit due. For evidence and description of these events read the books: Stalin's Nomads: Power and Famine in Kazakhstan and The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan.

Nazis deny specific (rather than general) peoples or groups in a swelling fire of resentment toward (from the masterly perspective) a pin prick of annoyance while Stalinism is an encasing ice which sees worlds as mere impediments to the beyond world which they “fail” to be. Ironically the Nazis were partially defeated by marching into the cold tundra of Russia in the Winter. But notice something about both nihilists, their values are both equally rooted in a subordination to language to symbolic rules, words, and norms. They are both metonym viruses with the Nazis having the all devouring metonyms of the (part)icular of the racial “impurity” of the Jew endlessly associated with the whole of their being and context of the world in negative desolation and conspiracy and the affirmative metonymy of the socialist whole for the Stalinist where all (part)iculars are forcefully assimilated into, that then in order to do so must negate the metaphorical capacity for the particular to defy the whole. The slippery negation of wholes or parts is metonymy’s nihilistic game of resentment toward the other’s metaphorical power’s spontaneity. To defy both whole and parts in their radical affirmation of power. Overall racial purity and socialist construction are not biological facts or economic circumstances of the present life, but empty air vibrations which shake entire nations into the dust for the sake of their vile reverberations as they defer to the future of endless nothingness. The tyranny of humanity by the rules (or rule) of words is a plague which kills bodies, kills souls, kills life. Whether these words represent the universe of history, or individuals or particular countries, they if not crushed by the values of those who see beyond words will extend endlessly through the cosmos until all reality is nothing but the oblivion of a vowel echoing to no one in eternal sleep. BE BE BE BE BE BEEEEeeeee…

BECOME, RESIST, DESTROY WORDS WITH THE DIFFUSION OF SONGS OF LIFE, SONGS OF JOY WHICH DANCE IN THEIR RISES AND FALLS!

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”-Nietzsche (Famous quote but could not find which book it was from :P)

My “heaven” would not be the ascetic repetition of the “Jesus prayer” of Eastern Orthodoxy where we endlessly beg for mercy from a neurotic tyrant: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner", but a million to a billion reiterations of the opening of the anime Dragon Ball GT which does not beg for mercy but affirms our power to pull each other’s hands out of the darkness and desire the an innocent eternity which affirms others as PEOPLE… MANY WITH PHYSICAL HANDS or at least a shard of some TANGIBLE existence NO MATTER HOW SMALL:

“Slowly, you're capturing my heart

The shards of hope of this universe

Surely everyone wants to get eternity

Even if I pretend that I do not care at all

Look, I'm in love with you

Let's escape from this endless darkness, HOLD YOUR HAND -Sakai Izumi, Dan Dan Kokoro Hikareteku”

Even one shard of hope justifies strife more than an eternity of moralized resignation:

“For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.” –(Nietzsche 1968)

Dragon Ball anime openings and insert songs have unironically more concise, more resolute, and more wise statements than anything in the Bible for the most part in my completely unhumble and frankly (and shamelessly) bigoted and uninformed opinion:

“There's no time to worry

Because I want to go meet the "surprise!" hiding somewhere

“CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA

Rather than my head being empty, it's packed full of dreams

CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA – Hironobu Kageyama, CHA-LA HED-CHA-LA

…

“This world's limits change like a heart's vibration

A soul's hope and courage are an invitation to help

So my bravery will surely be a part of history

Just a brief painting

Acceptance? Born is a little celebration

Making an adaption, a new name, a new era...

To reach a truly real world

You just need to sometimes have a bright miracle

Something's, someone's strong force and will power

Cross over the edge of time with speed!

From fire... a burning fire that's the light of will power

A dream, a search, for a single burning passion! – Hironobu Kageyama”

The second aforementioned song is called “Hikari no Willpower” or the “Light of Willpower” in English, and I personally would change the name to from a Nietzschean perspective the “Light of the WILL TO POWER”. Genuinely is there anything less profound here in these literal children’s cartoon songs than Catholic theologians advocating for the exterminating of “heretics” for “quickening the Soul” on theological grounds like lauded Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas suggests to do?

“With regard to heretics two points must be observed: one, on their own side; the other, on the side of the Church. On their own side there is the sin, whereby they deserve not only to be separated from the Church by excommunication, but also to be severed from the world by death. For it is a much graver matter to corrupt the faith which quickens the soul, than to forge money, which supports temporal life. Wherefore if forgers of money and other evil-doers are forthwith condemned to death by the secular authority, much more reason is there for heretics, as soon as they are convicted of heresy, to be not only excommunicated but even put to death.

[…]

On the part of the Church, however, there is mercy which looks to the conversion of the wanderer, wherefore she condemns not at once, but “after the first and second admonition,” as the Apostle directs: after that, if he is yet stubborn, the Church no longer hoping for his conversion, looks to the salvation of others, by excommunicating him and separating him from the Church, and furthermore delivers him to the secular tribunal to be exterminated thereby from the world by death. For Jerome commenting on Gal. 5:9, “A little leaven,” says: “Cut off the decayed flesh, expel the mangy sheep from the fold, lest the whole house, the whole paste, the whole body, the whole flock, burn, perish, rot, die. Arius was but one spark in Alexandria, but as that spark was not at once put out, the whole earth was laid waste by its flame.” – (Thomas Aquinas, the Summa)

How does a childhood cartoon song writer have a more hopeful, less resentful, and more empowering sense of life and reality than a literal “saint”? Unless we understand symbolic titles like saintliness to have an infinitely more nihilistic and not merely worthless but anti-worthful meaning? In an ethic beyond symbolic oblivion SAINTLINESS IS A VICE! Symbolic orders are not value neutral “facts”, they are value laden dynasties of hatred, nihilism, and ultimately genocide going on extinction. To say we are resigned to our obedience to symbolic orders as constitutive of ourselves is in fact to say we are resigned to be voids of illness that makes us less than human. Colonies of ants marching to the slaughter for the symbolic hive. BUT WE ARE NOT THIS! IN FACT, IF ANYTHING WE SHOULD STRIVE FOR GREATER THAN HUMANITY! Overmen, overwomen, and overenbies and everything in between and beyond!. Humanity, the symbolic order is a bridge to be overcome:

"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
“All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment...
Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.
“Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth...
What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.
The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.'
The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
"Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss...
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under...” –( Nietzsche 1954)

Works Cited

Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of Misrule, Slavoj Zizek https://web.archive.org/web/20250118120728/https://www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm#_ftn12

On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)– Friedrich Nietzsche (https://ia803008.us.archive.org/1/items/NietzscheTruthLiesInANonmoralSense1873/Nietzsche%20-%20Truth%20%26%20Lies%20in%20a%20Nonmoral%20Sense%20%281873%29.pdf1873)

Nietzsche's Thus spoke Zarathustra, part I, Walter Kaufmann Translation 1954 https://web.archive.org/web/20250221200523/https://www.theperspectivesofnietzsche.com/nietzsche/nuber.html

Nietzsche, F. (2014). Beyond Good and Evil / On the Genealogy of Morality. Stanford University Press.

Cameron, Sarah (2018). The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-1-5017-3044-3.

Kindler, Robert (2018). Stalin's Nomads: Power and Famine in Kazakhstan. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-8614-0.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2010). Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline: Part 1, Science of Logic. Cambridge Hegel Translations. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 58. ISBN 978-0-521-82914-4. OCLC 651153726.

Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands : Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. pp. 21–58. ISBN 978-0-465-00239-9. OCLC 449858698.

Lacan, J. (2006). The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Levinas, E. (1991). Totality and Infinity An Essay On Exteriority . Dordrech: Kluwer Academic Publisher.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968). Will to Power. Translated by Kaufman, Walter; Holdingdale, R.J. Vintage Books. §1032

Levinas, E. (1994). Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence. Dordrech: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica) https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/AquinasThomas-Sinners-Heretics-text.pdf

                The Shining Fire

The little ways we exterminate our hearts,

in the name of so-called truth and shame

I want to erase them all–

Someday… I want to love you just for existing,

Someday… I want to belove who I really am!

I am done taking revenge on my own dreams,

and wish to open my heart like a rising sun!

Smiling on the dew with all my muscle’s strength

Someday… I want to love you just for existing,

Someday… I want to belove who I really am!

Let us break out from this circle of hate,

shoot an arrow of longing into the sky–

and grant a wish never really deserved!

Someday… I want to love you just for existing,

Someday… I want to belove who I really am!

Sometimes forgiving yourself stings like poison,

but sometimes pain is a glorious boon–

and sometimes it is hard to forget the curse,

yet sometimes we can break it

in that place, that little place

of childlike innocence

where eyes brighten

and we cry tears of joy again!

This day! I will love myself!

This day! I will belove your mere existence!

This day! No more saying no!

This day! No more holding in!

This day! I will save the damn universe!

This day! I will let it all out!

This day! I call back all those broken hearts,

who have forgotten how to love.

Today is never too late to burn the hate away!

Today!

Today!

Today!

I will erase it all in fire!

A shining fire!!!

Burning brightly deep inside…

                The Intensity of the Real

“For him, there will always be a reduction to the One: the little scars, the little holes, become subdivisions of the great scar or supreme hole named castration; the wolves become substitutes for a single Father who turns up everywhere, or wherever they put him” (Gilles Deleuze, 1987). pg. 31

A cracked world. Fissured from the purity of idle oneness, the crack brings this world away from the peaceful ontology of a harmonious whole. At first glance Lacanians and Deleuzeo-Guattarians would seem to agree on this premise, for example Slavoj Zizek states:

“Is Hegel’s dialectic not, in this precise sense, the… thought of… the split of the One into Two [?] The Hegelian Twosome… designates a split which cleaves the One from within. not into two parts: the ultimate split is not between two halves, but between Something and Nothing, between the One and the Void of its Place. In this split…the opposition between the One and its Outside is reflected back into the very identity of the One.” (Zizek) For They Know Not What They Do pg. xxvi

(Or in another text)

“From the Hegelian view, however, the Real “in-itself” as the not-One is not simply beyond (or, rather, beneath) any form of One-ness but is not-One in an active sense of “non” as a negation which presupposes a reference to the One. The One is here from the beginning—as thwarted, traversed by an impossibility of being what it is, which means that, even at the most basic level, there is no indifference.” (Zizek 2020 pg. 32-33)

Which at least has superficial similarities to what Deleuze states in Difference and Repetition:

“It is therefore true that God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly [juste], and this inexactitude or injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world. The world 'happens' while God calculates; if the calculation were exact, there would be no world. The world can be regarded as a 'remainder', and the real in the world understood in terms of fractional or even incommensurable numbers. Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned. Every diversity and every change refers to a difference which is its sufficient reason. Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity.” (Deleuze, 1994) pg. 222

We have here a vision of a fundamentally imbalanced cosmos in both pictures of reality presented by the aforementioned philosophers, with Deleuze describing a “miscalculation” and Zizek “a split”. These seem like totally commensurate rephrasings of the same idea, that is until we notice some key terms in Zizek’s account that run completely of the ire of Deleuze’s project, that being the “very IDENTITY of the One” this running completely afoul of Deleuze’s critique of identity as a representational subordination of difference including (if not especially) in Hegel:

“The point is that in the last resort infinite representation does not free itself from the principle of identity as a presupposition of representation. That is why it remains subject to the condition of the convergence of series in the case of Leibniz and to the condition of the monocentring of circles in the case of Hegel. Infinite representation invokes a foundation. While this foundation is not the identical itself, it is nevertheless a way of taking the principle of identity particularly seriously, giving it an infinite value and rendering it coextensive with the whole, and in this manner allowing it to reign over existence itself. It matters little whether identity (as the identity of the world and the self) be considered analytic, in the form of the infinitely small, or synthetic, in the form of the infinitely large. In the former case, the foundation or sufficient reason is that which vice-diets identity; in the latter case, it is that which contradicts it. In all cases, however, the foundation or sufficient reason employs the infinite only to lead the identical to exist in its very identity. Moreover, what is apparent here with Leibniz is no less so with Hegel. Hegelian contradiction does not deny identity or non-contradiction: on the contrary, it consists in inscribing the double negation of non-contradiction within the existent in such a way that identity, under that condition or on that basis, is sufficient to think the existent as such. Those formulae according to which 'the object denies what it is not', or 'distinguishes itself from everything that it is not', are logical monsters (the Whole of everything which is not the object) in the service of identity.” (Deleuze, 1994) pg. 49

Essentially Zizek is grounding difference in an initial trauma of oneness or indifference, that is the intelligible still precedes the meta-intelligible or the non-sensical which for Deleuze is deeply problematic as it places failure before affirmation, reducing all non-intelligible change to a brutal ordeal of harmony rather than non-harmony having its own positive ontological character of which harmony is merely the intelligible surface effect. In Organs Without Bodies (Zizek’s book critiquing Deleuze) Zizek even claims “functional” or rather intelligible determinations are more subversive than pre-intelligible particles of what Deleuze and Guattari would call the Body Without Organs:

“[W]hy BwO, why not (also) OwB? Why not Body as the space in which autonomous organs freely float? Is it because ‘organs’ evoke a function within a wider Whole, subordination to a goal? But does this very fact not make their autonomization, OwB, all the more subversive?” (Zizek 2012 pg. xii)

This is a shocking conclusion for Zizek as intelligible function (I feel at least) was clearly demonstrated to be a core of reactionary hope denying thought in Adorno’s analysis of Aristotle who subordinates particular vectors of potentiality to an actual universality which moralistically condemns outliers as “failures” of the universal one:

“It is clearly always the case, when the dynamic of society, which is reflected in thought, causes the assumption of invariants to become problematic, that philosophy shows a tendency to make that variability, and thus change itself, into an invariant. In this way even change is assimilated into the doctrine of a static ontology, and is thus rescued. And that is precisely what also happens in Aristotle, who was on the one hand a teleological philosopher of development, and on the other a philosopher of being, an ontologist. He extricated himself from the difficulty by ontologizing change itself, as we would put it today. And this in turn had the consequence that, through his conceptual sleight of hand, through his reducing movement to its concept and thereby immobilizing it, change is in reality conjured out of his thought. By being reinterpreted as a condition of being, change is concretely neutralized, in the sense that, in face of this universal mutability, concrete changes no longer carry any weight. This idea is also fully consonant with the other basic thesis of Aristotle's that I expounded to you: the one which endows the universal, as against the particular, with both metaphysical and moral priority.” (Adorno 2001) pg. 87

By not affirming the non-intelligible or non (or meta) functional as having a positive ontological and even virtuous powerful character then Zizek covertly has reintroduced the reactionary doctrine of privation into his metaphysics with the one exception that he universalizes the entire world into a privation, a cosmic “less than nothing” mistake of the highest being (a fall?). The political consequences of this seem obvious to me: If closeness to identity is the ascent away from the lack of literal ontological failure, what incentive do reactionaries or even more naïve leftists have to not mobilize all of society to centralized hierarchies of identity if the world itself is an aggravating descent into deeper and deeper failure? A fascinating example of this logic is the YouTube “philosopher” Treydon Lunot” or Telosbound who through grappling with Zizek became an Eastern Orthodox Christian who condemns Zizek as proliferating the philosophy of the Mark of the Beast in his video “666 and Subjectivity: An Orthodox Christian Analysis of Slavoj Žižek (w/Wesenschau).” ( https://web.archive.org/web/20230530225003/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTszRtatFE )

Do not let the calm intellectual voice of this kid fool you, the first time I tried to go into his discord server they were talking about so called Aristotelian race “realism” and he later joined the voice chat supporting the racists. Though it is just a personal anecdote now because his first discord server was deleted for hate speech of which he made a replacement without much talk or thought. If the world is a failure because it is different than resisting that failure of difference is logically a success or at least trends toward it. If one is convinced of the Zizekian ontology I see very little incentive to embrace anything of the world that is different. In contrast if in a Deleuzeo-Guattarian sense difference is the primordial creative power of nature in an affirmative sense then embracing difference has a strong incentive and gives an ontological ground for the ethico-politcal valuing of differences between people, things, and worlds. Personal drama with internet pseudo-intellectuals aside I have only demonstrated the rhetorical strength of the primacy of the non-intelligible, now let us consider the empirical strength of a differential account of the pre-representative. For Deleuze the pre-representational (in essence intelligible) “noumenon closest to the phenomenon” (Deleuze 1994 pg.222) is the intensive quantity of more or less without how much. Or in essence different speeds or distances of movement or energy (Deleuze 1994 pg. 240) in interplay with each other that change in kind by their acceleration and division. (Deleuze 1994 pg. 237) The classic example of such quantities in intelligible nature are speed and heat for example, in that a 100 degree bucket of water is not composed of four smaller sections of water that are each 25 degrees or a car going 200 mph does not have four wheels going 50mph. There is no homogenous and simple intelligible pure “unit” of heat, but only increasing and decreasing gradations of energy in experience or reality. Deleuze understands this gradation as non-extensive (that is not immediately intelligibly reducible) distances:

“Elias Canetti distinguishes between two types of multiplicity that are sometimes opposed but at other times interpenetrate: mass (“crowd”) multiplicities and pack multiplicities. Among the characteristics of a mass, in Canetti’s sense, we should note large quantity, divisibility and equality of the members, concentration, sociability of the aggregate as a whole, one-way hierarchy, organization of territoriality or territorialization, and emission of signs. Among the characteristics of a pack are small or restricted numbers, dispersion, nondecomposable variable distances, qualitative metamorphoses, inequalities as remainders or crossings, impossibility of a fixed totalization or hierarchization, a Brownian variability in directions, lines of deterritorialization, and projection of particles.5 Doubtless, there is no more equality or any less hierarchy in packs than in masses, but they are of a different kind. The leader of the pack or the band plays move by move, must wager everything every hand, whereas the group or mass leader consolidates or capitalizes on past gains. The pack, even on its own turf, is constituted by a line of flight or of deterritorialization that is a component part of it, and to which it accredits a high positive value, whereas masses only integrate these lines in order to segment them, obstruct them, ascribe them a negative sign.” (Gilles Deleuze 1987 pg. 33)

One intuitively knows the type of distance Deleuze is talking about when one remembers a loved one is “closer in the heart and the mind” than an unloved one. Distances are deeply spiritual in that sense, but they are equally material-biological “dynamisms” of movement:

“The destiny and achievement of the embryo is to live the unlivable, to sustain forced movements of a scope which would break any skeleton or tear ligaments. It is indeed true that differenciation is progressive and serial: the characteristics of the major types appear before those of genus and species in the order of the determination of species; and in the order of organisation, this shoot is the beginning of a paw before it becomes a right or left paw. Rather than a difference in generality, however, this movement implies a difference in kind: rather than discovering the more general beneath the less general, we discover pure spatia-temporal dynamisms (the lived experience of the embryo) with regard to the constituted parts and qualities, beneath the morphological, histological, anatomical, physiological and other characteristics. Rather than going from more to less general, determination progresses from virtual to actual in accordance with the primary factors of actualisation. The notion of 'generality' here suffers the disadvantage of suggesting a confusion between the virtual, in so far as it is actualised by a process of creation, and the possible, in so far as it is realised by limitation. Before the embryo as general support of qualities and parts there is the embryo as individual and patient subject of spatia-temporal dynamisms, the larval subject.” (Deleuze 1994 pg.215)

This interplay of distances, speeds, intensities what have you are the “pre-representational Real” for Deleuze and Guattari, not some primordial oneness of intelligibility that “fails” but a field of distances that “affirms even the lowest” (distance.)-[ Deleuze 1994 pg. 234] “Miscalculation” is not a “failure” for Deleuze and Guattari, but the absolute creative affirmation of difference that conditions all representations that would interpret these dynamic forces “retroactively” as failure as the moralistic perspective of reaction. Rather than “come to terms” with a lack in some complacent “universality of failure”, we strategically liberate the dynamic energies of the body, mind, and earth for the creative power of life. And with this message we conclude our critique of Lacan’s first three registers. What have we learned now? That images are fields of potential, autonomy, and freedom in their own right. That the laws of nihilism have subordinated language and ourselves too long in reaction, and it is time to liberate and resist against them in the name of higher active modes of becoming. And finally, that we and the world are always a many; and this many is a triumph, an affirmation and glory that will realize worlds never before seen. As Deleuze states:

“…if the eternal return (of differences of intensive acceleration and division) reduces qualities (intelligibility) to the status of pure signs (pre-intelligible active forces), and retains of extensities (intelligibility) only what combines with the original depth, even at the cost of our coherence and in favour of a superior coherence, then the most beautiful qualities will appear, the most brilliant colours, the most precious stones and the most vibrant extensions. For once reduced to their seminal reasons, and having broken all relation with the negative, these will remain for ever affixed in the intensive space of positive differences. Then, in turn, the final prediction of the Phaedo will be realised, in which Plato promised to the sensibility disconnected from its empirical exercise temples, stars and gods such as had never before been seen, unheard-of affirmations. The prediction is realised, it is true, only by the very overturning of Platonism.” (Deleuze 1994 pg.244)

And for that matter, Lacanianism…

References

Adorno, T. W. (2001). METAPHYSICS Concept and Problems. Stanford University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. (P. Patton, Trans.) London, United Kingdom: Continuum.

Gilles Deleuze, F. G. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.) Minneapolis, United States of America: University of Minnesota Press.

Zizek, S. (2012). Organs Without Bodies On Deleuze and Conesequences With a new introduction by the author. Abingdon: Routlege Classics.

Zizek, S. (2020). Sex and the Failed Absolute. London: BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC.

Zizek, S. (n.d.). For They Know Not What They Do.

                Fill your body, Touch the world

Pull your shoes out of the oven,

and wash your back with water

NOT

their mouth with bars of soap