Response to Creston Davis' "Zizek on Love and Lack

Creston Davis

http://crestondavis.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/zizek-on-love-and-lack/#comments

Paul of Tarsus attempts to define love in a famous passage from the New Testament:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; …. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end…. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.[1]

Here it is important to grasp the opposition that Paul frames while he defines the indefinable–love: There are prophecies, language (tongues), and there is knowledge each of these are finite and bounded. By contrast there is love, which is infinite and unbounded. We can grasp the meaning of prophecies (future predictions and so forth) in the present, we can understand the complex nuances of language, and we can understand knowledge—how it functions, where it fails etc. But notice that all three examples are defined by their definability—that is, their “meaning” which only reaches the limit defined by our finite understanding. In this precise sense, meaning is limited to its own structure and this repeats the same security centered logic stated above.

( In other words, meaning is devoid of risk and the only thing left for meaning is its own death. Truth and Love, on the other hand, are uncontainable—and inherently defies the desire to contain and define it (within the borders of a security-state). Love by contrast is excess, endless and never ending excess.

One recent interpretation of Paul’s passage on love is worth repeating. Slavoj Zizek sets up a dialectical opposition between the universal “All” (which includes Knowledge and prophecies) and its exception the void of the “nothing” (Love). Here Zizek introduces us to a twist when he says that “…even if I were to possess all knowledge, without love I would be nothing, is not simple that withlove, I am ‘something’—in love, I am also nothing but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack. Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion…. [O]nly an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we donot know all.”[2]

Here again we see the same motif rise to the surface but in paradoxical form: Because we can know the universal-All (knowledge, language, science, etc.) in reality we cannot know it-All. In the heart of the universal there is a trick—what we think we possess and control we actually don’t control it. Love thus presents to us the crack in the universal that exposes the exception to the universal—the exception that founds the lack—the incomplete—the abyss. Zizek’s insights show this paradox of knowledge well, but here I would like to push his interpretation one step further. Zizek says that in the lack we become aware of ourselves –the “lack” if you will becomes conscious of itself as lack. But is this not another way to sneak knowledge (consciousness, etc.) in through the back door? Could it not be that what precisely defines “lack” is its unknowable nature hidden deep within—wholly out of reach—the abyss of nothingness? This is why we must persist that when Zizek says that the “ultimate mystery of love is its incompleteness” is always incomplete. For is not Zizek wrong when he tries to unite consciousness (even a “humble” consciousness) with the lack which would make lack conscious of itself as lack and this would instantly turn “lack” into knowledge? And, again, if lack comes to terms with itself as lack it can no longer be lack but a positive, possessive form of knowledge. And here we find ourselves back into the security-state of mastery. In sum, Zizek doesn’t risk enough here instead he go up to the limit and retreats back into the domain of knowledge falling short and thus giving up on the very possibility of the impossible—love.

I would propose a different possibility—a possibility that most fundamentally becomes impossible: lack must always resist its self-enclosure—its exposure in the full light of day. The mystery of lack must remain beyond the security zone of knowledge despite the great temptation to surround and destroy it with the weapons of reason. This procedure is, I believe, more faithful to Hegel’s thesis in The Phenomenology of Spirit where he attempts to account for the unaccountable that gives rise to how the world comes to terms with itself as above all a contingent and fragile world. Inherently built into this fragile world there is risk a risk that could bring the whole house-of-cards down at any moment. The fragility of the world is a world left without guarantee or an insurance policy.

---

[1] 1 Corinthians 13. NRSV

[2] Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), p. 146-47.

I agree that “meaning is defined by our finite understanding of it,” but I would add that the limit is not a closure, but rather an inherent porous boundary. Rather than meaning and knowledge having an internal structural logic or process that controls its own content, meaning is tied to the contingencies of social practice, which therefore induces a temporal dimension (its historicity).

The most profound consequence of the historicity of meaning, which in its everyday practice opens it to the contingencies of its temporal unfolding, is the axiom that it always remains open ended, contested, and able to be falsified, (the latter most associated with science, better technology, etc). I take the “security centered logic” as the constant policing and political power employed to buttress certain interpretations (to fix meaning once and for all, though this seems to always eventually fail due to unstoppable transformations of meaning). Likewise, there are always attempts to “normalize” the status quo: “we are at the end of history once free markets and democracy rule”; fix the meaning of a text: the Catholic Church is not very supportive of alternative readings of scripture; or attempts to ground the contingencies of cultural belief into knowledge, for example Western categories of race, transposed into the rise of “scientific racism” of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

That said, I think the above more or less coheres with Zizek's immanentist (atheist) understanding of the relation between the “universal All” and its exception, the lack or “void.” I understand that when Zizek starts talking about the “void” and a “lack,” he is referencing “our” (universal transcendental subject's) relation to the “real.” This way we both constitute the “real” and its “lack” vis a vis our subject position and its inevitable “failed” apperception, which is more obvious when considering “traditional” modes of apperception: religion, art, myth embedded within the master symbolic system of language. Nonetheless, for Zizek, even science ultimately has no epistemological advantage in the final analysis, a point Zizek takes up in the “Parallax View,” by arguing that neuropsychology (physics as archetype) is caught in a web of words and tropes, mediating to the end the “subject--real” divide. If this is the case (which it may not be...), it is the starting point from which Zizek theorizes the nature of “love.” In structural terms, as I understand it, Love comes into being through an internal relation to the fundamental lack/ void. However, it is not clear to me why subjects' relations to the “real,” an eternal relation of “lack,” has as a consequence that “[O]nly an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we do not know all.” For me, this is another Lacanian moment of obfuscation. Is Love some sort of compensatory mechanism to assuage anxiety? And how exactly can love, as a breaking down of the rational ordered ego and the breaking down of intersubjective barriers, be described as such: “the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion.”

Love then for Zizek seems more of an unintended consequence or by-product of the subject-real relation. Love for Zizek also appears to be the sine qua non of being human, that has impulses uncontrollable by the State, ideology, and structure because of its excess and unboundedness. Whatever Love is precisely, it is here that I question whether or not Zizek is “sneaking knowledge (consciousness, etc.) in through the back door.” The lack Zizek spells out, originating in a primordial structure consisting of the subject-gap-real cannot be overcome. As human beings we are inescapably constrained by the symbolic realm, and though we have several modes of approaching the “real,” (Ernst Cassirer's modes of apperception come to mind: myth, religion, art, science, and language), we are left ultimately to face an existential void, though many, via attachment to various “big others” and “subjects supposed to know,” ameliorate their anxiety.

But if one is honest about humanity's existential condition in the face of the real, the Void, even having an “advanced” understanding of a fundamental “lack” and being able to explicate its origin and consequences in psychoanalytical (Lacan, Zizek) or philosophical (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) terms, such knowledge hardly has the traction to return “ourselves back into the security-state of mastery.” And perhaps you could even argue that the epistemology behind “knowledge of the lack” in the final analysis undermines its own claims. At a minimum, knowledge of the “lack” may provide some basis for ethics, responsibility, authenticity and all that.

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MacIntyre on money from Prospect Magazine

"At this point, MacIntyre appeals to the classical golden mean: “The courageous human being,” he cites Aristotle as saying, “strikes a mean between rashness and cowardice… and if things go wrong she or he will be among those who lose out.” But skilful money-men, MacIntyre argues, want to transfer as much risk as possible to others without informing them of its nature. This leads to a failure to “distinguish adequately between rashness, cowardice and courage.” Successful money-men do not—and cannot—take into account the human victims of the collateral damage resulting from market crises. Hence the financial sector is in essence an environment of “bad character” despite the fact that it appears to many a benevolent engine of growth."

Adam Smith noticed a similar conflict in the relationship between the motivation for private gain through free market system, in that the motive for a self-centered gain is morally problematic for Smith; however, he reconciles this moral flaw at the individual level with the notion of the "invisible hand," in which the societal benefits in general, as an unintended consequence of private motive, override the moral problem and justify the system in its totality.

Furthermore:

"MacIntyre maintains, however, that the system must be understood in terms of its vices—in particular debt. The owners and managers of capital always want to keep wages and other costs as low as possible. “But, insofar as they succeed, they create a recurrent problem for themselves. For workers are also consumers and capitalism requires consumers with the purchasing power to buy its products. So there is tension between the need to keep wages low and the need to keep consumption high.” Capitalism has solved this dilemma, MacIntyre says, by bringing future consumption into the present by dramatic extensions of credit.

This expansion of credit, he goes on, has been accompanied by a distribution of risk that exposed to ruin millions of people who were unaware of their exposure. So when capitalism once again overextended itself, massive credit was transformed into even more massive debt, “into loss of jobs and loss of wages, into bankruptcies of firms and foreclosures of homes, into one sort of ruin for Ireland, another for Iceland, and a third for California and Illinois.” Not only does capitalism impose the costs of growth or lack of it on those least able to bear them, but much of that debt is unjust. And the “engineers of this debt,” who had already benefited disproportionately, “have been allowed to exempt themselves from the consequences of their delinquent actions.” The imposition of unjust debt is a symptom of the “moral condition of the economic system of advanced modernity, and is in its most basic forms an expression of the vices of intemperateness, and injustice, and imprudence.”"

Wild Hare 2010 Race Report 50K

The Wild Hare 50 mile, 50K, 25K and 10K, formally known as the "Warda Cardiac," was held November 20 in Warda, Texas.

My wife Andreana and I wake up at 4:15 am. Coffee and gear in place, we load our sleeping boys Adrian (8) and Gabriel (6) with their blankets and pillows into our old Subaru wagon, and head into the night for the 90 minute drive to Warda, Texas, located due East from Austin. Our drive takes us on 290 East through extremely dense patches of fog, but as the morning's dawn peaks out while we head south on Highway 77, only a creepy mist remains, no more than 10 feet high hugging the ground and enveloping the trunks of thinly spaced trees. The faint light shows the sky is clear, divining the warm and sunny day ahead. We are officially in the backwoods of Texas, and we turn through the gates of Bluff Creek Ranch, an old cattle ranch, whose owners carved out miles of single track trails to stream revenue from mountain bikers and trail runners. We are directed to park by flashlight-wielding teenagers in heavy coats, and exit our stuffy car into the clear and crisp air of race day.

Typical pre-race activities: packet pick up, fiddling with safety pins on race numbers, gear checking, anxiety, and small talk. Gabriel, having opted not to run will work at the mid-point aid station under the care and firm hand of discipline of Henry Hobbs and Cris Strong. Andreana and Adrian will run the 10k, starting at 8am. My 50k race begins at 7am. The 50 milers had already begun at 6am, and while milling around the starting line minutes before our race, the first of the fastest 50 milers came into view. Holy crap, who are these people busting out a first loop in the mid-40 minutes?!? The race director and my coach, Joe Prusatis, begins yelling: "race is starting in 3 minutes..." Joyce Prusatis calls out two names for missing check in-- no response. "Two minutes..." Last discussions with fellow runners. "One minute..." And suddenly, no pistol shot, buzzer, or electronic timing sound, only an "alright, start.." The 45 of us begin running up a dirt road for several hundred yards to find Diana Heynen, who directs us to make a hard left turn onto the course.

The course consists of a seven mile loop, which for us 50k'ers, means making four rounds. The 50 milers will do seven, the 25k'ers two and the 10k'ers one truncated 6.2 mile version. To get the distance up to 50k, Joe front-ended the race with a mini loop, which consisted mostly of the last mile of the course.

I follow about 5 guys, clearly interested in frontrunning. I recognize Paul Salazar and Josue Stephens among them, runners I know are faster than I. I figure I will hang back and see what kind of pace they will lay down. We enter woods, pass small lakes and turn onto the final stretch-- the course oddly running through the middle of a cement-floored equipment shed-- and we cross the start/ finish line, beginning now the first of four loops proper. I continue my shadowing of the front runner group for two-three miles, they are talking and carrying on. I have set my watch timer to dictate a 20 minute fast pace, four minute active recovery regime, and so after 20 minutes into the race, my watch chimes, and following my plan, I slow down and lose sight of the leaders.

The first loop is wonderful and I feel great. Gabriel is super excited to see me pass through the middle aid station, and he fills my water bottle with Gatorade. The course as people said is fast, lots of flats and only a few minor climbs. The first half is twisty and curvy; the second half has several long, flat stretches through fields. We are in cattle country, but also oil country-- as we pass a massive oil field pump. The second half also has a few short descents and accents up and down the banks of a stagnant river, with a rickety bridge crossing back up the river ravine, signaling about a mile to the finish line. I come up onto the portion of trail of the earlier mini loop and see the 55 25k'ers beginning their "mini loop" extra mile, as it is now just after 8am. I cross the finish line, completing the first loop in 1:08. I briefly refill my water bottle with help from Joyce, Joe admonishes me to "run smart," and I am off again on the second.

Running multiple short loops can be good and bad. It is good because you learn the course fast, but bad for morale, because you always know exactly where you are and how much further you have to finish. I had not run Warda before, and so the first loop involved the usual pleasure of exploring new territory, but once accomplished, every additional loop becomes increasingly about my decline in relation to a very knowable future. Three more loops: "yikes." Two more loops: "oh shit." One more loop: "oh fucking hell, why am I doing this?"

My second loop is strong. I have a good groove and pace. During the first half I start finding 25 and 10k'ers on their first loop, and eventually meet Andreana and Adrian cruising their race. We chat briefly: words of encouragement, what we might have for dinner and so on. On the bridge coming back up from the fields, I pass Olga Varlamova running the 50 miler. We talk briefly, but she yells at me after I pass to "be careful-- pace yourself!!" I return to the finish line, with a split of 1:05, 2:13 total time.

My third loop is less strong. The longest run I had made in the run-up training for this race was 18 miles at Bandera, and I knew that this deficiency would catch up to me. During this loop I feel my energy faltering- tightness throughout my legs and some pain. I force myself to continue a steady pace and imbibe a steady supply of electrolyte capsules, calories and water. At the mid-point aid station, in my drop bag, I have a water bottle with two scoops of Perpetuem ready-made, which I exchange out, hoping this will help. Its effect is minimal. By the time I come around again, finishing the third loop, I am noticeably crapping out. My split is 1:11, total 3:24.

Ok, one more loop, last loop. I refill my water bottle, and head out. Within minutes I experience a sudden increase in leg cramping and stiffness. Running longer strides to stretch out, slowing down, taking one more S-cap, I try different things to feel better, without much luck. It is now time to gut this bad boy out. I concentrate only on the next step, with the small consolation this will be the last time I step on this particular piece of dirt. I roll through Henry's aid station, complaining, and ask if there is a lethal dosage of electrolytes pills, to which Henry replies, "at this stage of the race, no." I down a sample package of four E-caps, and continue moving in a lolloping pain-shuffle. I have set my watch to total run time to monitor my final time. My race goal is to finish under five hours, which would be a 50k PR. Time is ticking. Henry's advice came at 4:10. I know I cannot afford to walk and finish the remaining 3 miles under five hours. Decision time. My body and I, at odds over what to do, negotiate a settlement involving food, beer and a not insignificant sum of money. We continue to run, but slowly. The eventual fourth place finisher of the 50k, Nathan Jackson from Houston, passes me. A guy I think is a 50 miler passes me. Just after the bridge, I meet up with Tejas mate, Stephanie Huie. She is having a tough race day, in pain, on her third loop (she had run a road marathon the weekend before...). We talk, and she says magical words: "wow, you are almost done." Good news and adrenalin immediately take effect, I pick up my pace and grind out the last mileage. I cross the finish line at 4:46, with a split of 1:22. I have a new PR, but I do not know my place. I sink down on the grass, trashed out, and talk with my frequent running partner, Bhavesh Patel, who also PR'ed at 4:58. Joe comes up to me and hands me a small stone and iron ant. 5th Place. My first trail running trophy! The winner of the 50k, David Brown, finished in 3:56. Andreana also has a trophy. Out of 15 10k'ers, she placed 3rd female at 1:04. Adrian placed ninth overall at 1:07. Gabriel received an honorary Wild Hare medal for his aid station volunteer work. Receiving a medal is the sole motivating force behind Gabriel's interest in anything running related. Andreana gets me a hamburger and drives me home. A great day of running for the Haley family.