Reproduction. Now, I won't read the rest of the quotes, but there's a couple of things. This is just, I want to conclude here with some observations and three questions, or four questions rather. The social non-relation is inscribed within the capital relation, a self-valorizing value. Because even if there's no social relation, it seems, well, at least as far as I understand Marx, which is admittedly very limited, is that capital is a relation. It's a relation. Can one claim that the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction is propelled by drive without inadvertently substantializing the latter, a la Deleuze Guattari?
It seems clear that this is precisely what is to be avoided at all costs, but it's unclear to me whether the drive is a symptom of capital or capital is a symptom of the drive. Now, maybe that whole, I suspect that alternation will be kind of rejected or is confused or based on a confusion, But it's not obvious to me in what way you can characterize what role the notion of the drive plays in articulating the social non-relation and the capital relation. And finally, how does intervention configure the surplus of form and the excess of particularity?
And this is an important question because it's the link between theory and practice. Does systemic transformation, i.e., political intervention at the level of the capital relation, require a form of intervention? A form of intervention understood as a unity of theory and practice? In other words, to what extent does the, can one, is there a kind of recurrence of self-consciousness, of kind of speculative self-consciousness in the attempt to understand the way in which the drive, how the drive stands to the social non-relation and the capital relation.
I took Mladen's Hegel class as a good refresher. I was just wondering if you could tell me the difference between, because as far as I remember, Zizek kind of determines there is no sexual relation, but there is no class relation, which is different than there is no social relation as far as I understand it. So on the level of the class relation, we might be talking about the political. And when you're talking about contract and this, I don't know. I'm kind of interested in what that means. But for Althusser, class relation on the level of the political is fundamentally antagonism, not contradiction.
whereas the social relation which is the commodity form exchange value, use value, those things that is a contradiction and it is unfolding whether you take that to be a non-social social relation or not I'm not sure if that's the language the social relation as a contradiction you're saying does not exist in the same way that the sexual relation does not exist? Is that what I'm taking? Because I'm confused about the difference there. Well, I'm also, you know, that was Samuel Tomschik's characterization.
I take him to be saying that Marx breaks with traditional liberal bourgeois economy is by understanding the capitalist social order in this radically different way. in a way where you don't begin by, you don't pause a social relationship to begin with. Now, I think, no, I accept the distinction you just made between the class,
I guess, class antagonism and social relation. I mean, is that a distinction within Althusser? I mean, is that the distinction that Althusser wants to insist upon? He could circumvent the whole problem of social relations as a Hegelian. Okay, I see. Yes, yes. And then goes to fundamental, what some people would say contradiction, but he says antagonism, which is the class relation. Okay. And that fundamental relation is always the last instance. Yes, yes. I'm just wondering what the distinction that you're making.
When you say there is no such, there is no social relationship. It's a social non-relation. That's a formulation. It's a social non-relation. Are there any social sociality? Do you think there's no such thing as a social relationship? No, well, I believe, no, I believe that there is, it must be possible to think a social relation without, well, thinking the form of sociality without beginning with, without seeing it as emerging from relations amongst pre-constituted individuals. So I take it, already with Hegel, Hegel has a critique of the liberal conception of individualism
because the social relation is inscribed within self-consciousness. So the relationship to the other is constitutive of self-consciousness. So the question is, what happens? Well, because Marx doesn't want to start with self-consciousness. You get the social form. Yes, you get the social... Exactly, yes. ...retroactively comes back to the final social relation, which you didn't know. Yes. and so in this regard I mean I'm not at all sure I mean I don't think I can answer your question very well because it's I mean look I can understand the critical import of insisting of not understanding sociality
as a relation, as an alternative to kind of you know liberal individualism but clearly there must be a form of sociality and so the question is how is this, given that well if this form of sociality is kind of embedded within the the capital relation the capital relation, I mean it makes sense to say that I think and I think that would be the okay, okay okay Yes, and then Lorenzo and then Alenca. Yes, thanks. Exactly.
Well, a couple of questions. One is that you gave some symbolization of the recursion in Hegel. And I was just wondering whether the latter part of it, truth in itself, whether that should also not get complexified with each level. Otherwise, you would have a thing in itself left over when you take the thing to infinity. You would always have something left over. It doesn't get embedded into consciousness somehow. Yes, but I think that that only happens
That only happens once you've gone through the whole of the science of the experience of consciousness because initially this is why this is still phenomenal consciousness. It's precisely because it doesn't yet, it is still naively supposing a thing in itself as a substance. So in other words, there's always a kind of, there's a residue of a kind of naive realism at every level which is why the truth is not internally differentiated, which is why it's still a kind of naively realistic conception of truth. It's only when you reach, if you do reach absolute knowing, that the distinction between subject and object is overcome.
But that progression ought to lead to absolute knowing, right? Eventually, I mean, when you... Well, except that that's a toy model. And this is why I did that. That's a kind of, it's not an accurate recapitulation or description of the movement of, you know, the development of shapes of spirits. So if it's not accurate, that was my point. But I wanted to point out that there is a kind of automatism or mechanism. It's easy to kind of, there is a kind of mechanism operative in the operation of determinant negation.
But what any kind of, that kind of formalization will leave out is precisely the negativity. And it's the negativity which for Hegel is the decisive determining factor. The necessity. Yeah. Fair enough. So I wasn't worried about the negativity part of it. I was just worried that you would have something left over and so the symbolization wasn't quite accurate. Yes, no, no. It's, and yes, I would have to get, I mean, people have tried to kind of formalize bits of Hegel. So that's my second question. So does something like paratactic logic help to formalize Hegel? and related to that, does Zizek's,
I forget the term you used just after that slide, you brought in something that Zizek uses to break the dialectic in some way. I forget the terms, Yes, so I don't recall what term you used. Just a few slides after that particular symbolization. Yes, when he talks about the repetition. The repetition, yes. So the thing is why doesn't dialectic allow you to incorporate repetition because it is a kind of all-consuming movement and so why is repetition left out, so to speak?
Why doesn't it get incorporated in the determinant negation and in the self, another becoming, reintegrating into the self and so on? Because repetition involves a mode of negativity which is always, which never succeeds. You get all the, I went over it very fast but you can catalog and Mladen Dolar catalogs the kind of the modalities of unconscious negativity, repression, foreclosure. I can't remember them all.
So are all of those psychoanalytic categories? Yes, they're Freud's kind of modes of negation. So the point is that what happens is that you get... there's a... the drive fixates on a particular element. And this fixation resists conceptualization in Hegelian terms precisely because it's the absurd particularity, it's the irreducible particularity of whatever thing, which is the fulcrum of fixation.
So that's what Hegel is not interested in. I guess he doesn't think that that is significant to the experience of consciousness. Right. So the incorporation of... Yeah, sorry. I've got a left but we'll come back hopefully. I'm sorry to... Sorry, I didn't mean to monopolize. No, no, no. Great. I'm going to be a task master. So Lorenzo Chiesa. Thanks, Ray, for the paper. I would like to go back and push a bit on the conclusion just to see what you think about your own questions. Because if I understood you correctly, towards the end, what you're trying to do is to say what it would take to formulate, very roughly speaking, a consistent, even politically, but before that logically, given what you said about Hegel,
Lacanian Marxist position and I would say it's actually starting from the beginning of your paper a Hegelo-Lacanian Marxist position to which I think most or at least many of us would not mind to fight for but then you put that in terms of questions and perceive those questions as polite polemical risks that you were delineating in particular one that rung about with me just because I had an exchange with Slavio on this issue, I think this is where we take a completely different stance, is the question about whether there is, if I understood it correctly, and I didn't over-determine your question, whether there is a risk in delineating this Lacanian Marxist position
with regard to how you understand the drive and the risk of substantializing the drive as happens in Deleuze and Gattari. My question is, if this is actually a risk you see and whether the answer is affirmative, if you have any kind of antidote. And I will add something more. I mean, for me, that is a huge risk. I mean, Lacanian Marxism or Hegel or Lacanian Marxism is not immune to the mistake of Deleuze-Gatterie, which we could call some substantialization of the drive and it all goes back to something which is in a way very generally speaking hegelian in an ontological sense the big difference is the
difference go back to maya's question for me ontologically and socially between the axiom there is no relation sexual social and the non-relation is and to the to the cost of like Simplifying, I would say only the first axiom is Lacanian, the second is quasi-Deleuzean. Because what is at stake there is a different understanding, basic different understanding of the ontological stages of difference. Yes. Okay. Well, I mean, my questions were not intended to be... I mean, in a way, the request for clarification or illumination, because I am extremely interested in this material
and extremely sympathetic to the... I think it's the right... I'm increasingly convinced it's the right orientation to have. But there are things which are not clear to me. I mean, that's my problem. It's because I haven't read and understood enough. So it's my own perplexity that I'm expressing here. I'm not pointing out some kind of fatal shortcoming. And I guess, as far as, I think that distinction you just made between, you know, there is no relation and there is a non-relation, I think that's crucial. But strangely enough, you can understand Hegel in a way, what Mladen Dolar calls the Hegelian atom, as the claim that there is something which is a non-relation,
but it's not it's precisely not substantialized because it's not simply posited, it's not a principle or a ground and okay this is I think it seems in I think in the interpretation elaborated by Mladen the claim is that this there is a kind of a distinction without a difference. Both at the beginning of the logic, you have a distinction without a difference, where the immediate vanishing of being into nothing and nothing back into being, where this kind of fission, this coincidence of fission and fusion
is precisely the matrix within which dialectical, determinate negation will unfold. So in other words, so that there is determinate negation proceeds within this matrix of something which is neither, which is a kind of what you could call, well, you could call it a self-relating negativity, a negativity which is not the negation of anything, and therefore which isn't tied to affirmation. But then, the way in which that works in Hegel, because it's always retrospective, because I think Hegel thinks backwards. This is why it's a mistake to view him as a thinker of progress.
The whole of Hegel's thinking is uncovering, in a way, what always already needs to be in play in order to say or do anything at all. And this is why I think the Hegelian gesture is one of desubstantializing... But you can have such things, such retroactive, retrospective, non-theological, both starting with there is no relation and there is a non-relation. i.e. that alternative can both be developed in a non-naive way towards desubstantialization
but don't you think so i'm pushing it a bit farther don't you think that in your understanding of the position you are delineating which is incredibly complex so at least lacan hegel and marx involved not to mention laden and zizek etc but don't you think that there is a sort of of like inherent risk to go back to the point of substantialization of what you're talking about, especially the drive, when you start with the claim, which is an aprioristic claim, which you cannot prove as being wrong with regard to the other, but when you start with the claim, the non-relation is, don't you think that there is automatically, in a non-naive way, a risk of substantialization? Oh, yes, no, absolutely, yes. That's absolutely, but I think that that Hegel doesn't do that.