okay hi first we want to thank the organizers for having us as part of this event in particular we thank of course the Goethe Institute Barra, Myrt and Gregor and the others who have been working to organize what seems to be a a timely conference in the anniversary of Hegel's 250th. Yes, we want to thank everyone for having us, despite the fact that we couldn't make it to Ljubljana. We would have much rather been there in person. Yes, I'd also like to thank the organizers for allowing us to contribute in this way,
even though we're not able to be, we're sorry we can't be there. So it's not exactly going to be a discussion. We're going to present maybe separately, but two very linked short papers. And yes, so we thank you for listening to this. So I guess I'll begin. it's not haphazard that there are hegelians like us in beirut the reason for this is not only because hegel is a universal thinker who is directly relevant to thinking totality or modern society organized around real abstraction a totality that can never self-totalize but we
could also say that Beirut has been enchained for over a century in a temporality of disappearance and re-emergence. In Hegelian parlance we could say that there is a serious struggle for the emergence of spirit here, a struggle that keeps culminating in one failure after another. In a sense Beirut is more on the side of Hegel's Phoenix than the owl of Minerva and that is perhaps the source of all the trouble. It's always too late for change and and too soon to attempt it. The past year only has witnessed a failed revolution in Lebanon, financial collapse, and the complete symbolic crisis, the COVID pandemic, and the imminent threat of the virus,
as well as most recently the third largest non-nuclear man-made explosion in the history of humankind. In a sense, just when you think the end has happened, the epilogue presents a new ending. The end is followed by another end. And in between, there is only a state in which predictions of a worse end abound. An end to end all ends. A fantasy of an end to put us out of our misery. It is in this sense that one could say that the Beirut bomb has been even more disappointing than the status quo. Despite the misery and destruction it incurred, it didn't really bring the final end to the already ongoing misery, and yet already there is a prevalent nostalgia for the Beirut before the bomb,
as though life then was more tolerable. This inability to finish or end feels like there is not enough time to actually be in the end. There is no time to stick with the end. Something other than finitude is gluing historical moments together. This could largely be because symbolic crises always generated their own obverse monstrosities of symbolic afterlives. We know this, after all, since Cantorowicz's formulation of the king's two bodies. The king is dead, but long live the king. The logic of time governing symbolic crises always has been the oscillation between too soon and too late already. In Lacanian parlance, it is as though there is a temporality that is fated to oscillate between enjoyment and death.
Every moment is a potential moment of an end, yet it is always too late for a final end, a real end to end all the failed endings. The recent explosion in Beirut was in a sense predicted. Corrupt sectarian clientelism finally exploded in everyone's face, but even this happened too late. the explosion has instigated yet again fantasies of an even bigger end another end since the explosion there have been rumors circulating of an obscene civil war to bring even more carnage that is coming there's an ongoing financial hedging on the complete disappearance of lebanon circulating jokes and memes providing an imaginary meteor with exact coordinates of the country so as to ensure complete and final erasure of the entire nation, and so on and so on.
I want to suggest that the logic of a fantasy of an end is that it is too optimistic. It refuses to accept that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. The fantasy of a final end ignores that there is a potentiality for spurious infinite suffering, enjoyment and suffering. The wheels of history keep turning and turning, but really effectively going nowhere. The problem of potentiality and temporality here can be stated in Alenka Zupancic's terms. In her critique of Paolo Vierno, and I quote her, what makes history possible is a gap in potentiality itself. She adds, end of quote, and she adds further to this, that, quote, the gap in potentiality is inaccessible beyond appearance,
beyond its imitation which constitutes appearance, end of quote. The way I understand the statement is that the gap in potentiality is itself doubled, and this doubling effect is the substance of appearance or the form of appearance. The way I think Elenka put it was, every historical moment has its moment with or without cream. There is a with without status to historical unfolding, or perhaps in Hegelian terms, there is an irreconcilable gap between the in itself and the in and for itself. this problem of appearance can be considered to be the very same problem of power of the problem of the other or Lacan's formulations from there is an other to there is no other of the other in capitalist society labor power has to be assumed to have a potentiality while it is a
negativity cannot be squared with any expenditure of flesh and bone with any kind of physical expenditure but as we know from Marx it is not the source of value labor power rather the form of the commodity is the source of value. There is an incommensurability or a non-relation between labor power and its form of appearance in the commodity. The failure to realize labor power is embedded in the capitalist structure and becomes the source of surplus value. Of course, and as I'm sure you know, that Marx's only prescriptive position on productive activity in the EPM was based on Kant's definition of a work of art, activity becoming an end in itself and not a means towards another end. For Marx, activity or social activity has to be an end in itself
to overcome abstract domination. However, the fantasy of capital is concomitant with its own imminent end. It is always framed through crises. Capitalism relies on the failures of potentiality to be realized or the failure in potentiality itself. This problem is one that the epistemology of psychoanalysis, if there ever was one, assumes from the very beginning. There is no big other as such, but a form of a big other that is sustained by the very belief in its non-existence. The emperor was always a fool, an empty signifier, a naked force. The master lacks, and it is this very lack that sustains the symbolic order and strengthens it. And I think the example that was most evident in the summer school in Ljubljana last year
was, of course, no one other than Donald Trump himself, who strikes the point here. Alenka Zupancic argues that jouissance is the glue that carries a repetition structure for the originally missing signifier, which in turn sets off the signifying chain or the symbolic function. The status of this originally missing signifier remains to be, however, a serious point of contention amongst contemporary interpreters of Lacan. and it brings us to a very serious question. Is the symbolic unstable characterized by the non-existence of the signifier while topology and formalization are stable or are they both characterized by instability? And it is precisely this instability that tethers them to the real.
In other words, how do we link the formal unconscious to the material unconscious? In the Ljubljana summer school last year, Mladen Dolar proposed an intriguing formulation. that the epistemological grounds of truth is nothing but the rumor, or you had this formulation of rumor as ressence, or rumor as enjoyment. What is particular about rumors is their as-if quality. As Dolar put it, to quote, the capacity of the rumor to affect things by naming, end of quote. So the rumor, like enjoyment, points to a crucial problem of nomination. For it is never rumor that speaks in the first person, but always presents itself in the slip. Rumor always speaks in a voice from an elsewhere.
So if the conference concept note is taken seriously, then the proposal is perhaps for this. The rumor has it that the world has ended, that it is already too late for anything. So now what? How can we put to work a successful rumor that would not deflect us from the truth further but make us face the miserable truth of the real? The status of the subject of the unconscious is precisely what we arrive at from the problem of history and temporality. This is because the temporality of the unconscious is not only constituted around a retroaction or a nachtraglichkeit, but there is also a second movement, a repetition with retroaction and a repetition that re-inscribes jouissance in a singular manner.
The idea that the worst has already happened, that it is too late, only comes with a longing for a time when nothing happened. Besides nostalgia for a past where nothing happens and a longing for an end that will put us out of our misery, we would also have anxiety. Anxiety emerges precisely when there is an impossibility to finish, to end, but it is crucial in analysis for identifying with a symptom. Once that happens, it becomes very clear for the subject that there is really no easy way out, that anxiety can itself become a form of jouissance separate from desire. Psychoanalysis ultimately claims that we have to accept that there is no way out for something else to be possible.
The question here that poses itself, however, is, does this not still fall into the idealist trap yet again, the idealist trap that Slavoj Žižek keeps kind of railing about, the trap of self-positing subjectivity. Does Lacan or Lacanian psychoanalysis really help us escape this idealist problem? The concept note seems to suggest there is a too-lateness that is not only a nakhtraglikaj, that there is something in reality that isn't adequate to the concept, that there is a stuckness, a something that cannot be worked through. and that only through the naming of this stuckness, what is proposed as a postulate of too-lateness, that some form of politics becomes possible.
Or in other words, that only if we really think it is too late can something happen. Now, something or nothing can happen adds another complication to the matter. There's an uncanny similarity here with Adorno's formulations on too-lateness and his particularly brilliant reading of Beckett's Endgame. In Endgame, Adorno argues, and I quote from Adorno, the dialogue sounds as though the law of its progression were not the rationality of statement and rejoinder, or even their psychological interconnection, but rather a process of hearing something out, akin to the process of listening to music that is emancipated from pre-existing forms. End of quote. Adorno's most interesting claim in his reading of Beckett is based on Benjamin's idea of a dialectic at a standstill,
that there is in the depiction of the end by Ham, and to quote from Adorno, an imageless image of death, that is an image of indifference, that is a state prior to differentiation. end of quote. For Adorno, as for Benjamin, it appears that this standstill or negative ontology offers yet another absurdity beyond the ones that existentialism is stuck in, where the peacefulness of the void for Adorno and the peacefulness of reconciliation can no longer be distinguished. Adorno sees that Ham and Clove depict consciousness's desire to look at its own end in the eye, as though it wanted to survive it. The problem here for Adorno is that consciousness desires to survive its own end.
One can only agree with Adorno's reading of Beckett beyond the terms of existentialist philosophy. However, the voice through which the characters speak is not the voice of consciousness, of reason alone. It cannot be squared with the I whose substantiality against which the ego synthesizes itself. What Beckett's characters are thinking through is not really something, but nothing. Mladen Dolar's claim, and I can't recall where now, that in Beckett's plays it is nothing that does happen. Nothing happens. And it does so through a voice that is extimate to the subject of consciousness. this extimate nature of the voice is precisely what the eternal life of spirit hinges on the
drive in a Lacanian sense as the negation that precedes all negations cannot be the standstill of the dialectic the moment where repose reconciliation and annihilation are made equivocal in other words the drive seems to be more on the side of a movement that has no end that cannot end, that is without punctuation. But on the other hand, death or symbolic death, psychoanalytic symbolic death, second death, is the hardest of tasks because it is a death that has to wrestle itself away from the compulsions of the drive. The subject must insist on properly dying despite all the attempts to actualize potentiality or the crack in potentiality or the failure in potentiality itself.
In a sense, one can say that it is never too late to die anyway, keeping in mind that the final repose promises no reconciliation. Death always comes on time. It is the second death, the true end, that cannot be aufhebohmd, what cannot be grasped in its concept. Thank you. Okay, I'm going to continue some of the themes that Nadia touched on, especially in her discussion
of Adorno's interpretation of Beckett's endgame. So I want to address the issue of what the conference conspectus calls our relation to the radical end, as well as its connection to our too-lateness, by considering two texts by Adorno. Trying to understand Endgame, from 1961, and Progress, from 1962. The first is relevant because of what Adorno says there about the end of meaning. the second because of its account of the dialectic of progress and regression which seems to me to harbor the key to Adorno's rejection of the false reconciliation of rationality and actuality so I'll not address Hegel directly but I hope to do
so indirectly by trying to circumscribe why Adorno insists on severing reconciliation from justification. Why is Endgame so exemplary for Adorno? Three reasons suggest themselves. First, it is a drama about the end of drama, but one that presents drama's impossibility without dramatizing it. Second, it is a text about the end of meaning, but one that configures meaninglessness without ennobling absurdity by turning it into a metaphysical predicament, as existentialism does for Adorno. And third, it constructs a form that takes the obsolescence of form as its material,
without thereby presuming to have superseded it. In this regard, Endgame's achievement for Adorno lies in managing to express historical truth at a moment when the disparity between social experience and the resources of meaningful expression threatens to render truth unintelligible. Endgame renders historical truth intelligible by confronting this disparity and reflecting upon the lapse in the conditions of meaning and the end not of this or that, but of everything. And here's Adorno. In Endgame, a historical moment unfolds, namely the experience captured in the title of one of the culture industry's cheap novels, Kaput.
After the Second World War, everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed without realizing it. humankind continues to vegetate creeping along after events that even the survivors cannot really survive on a rubbish heap that has made even reflection on one's own damaged states useless the word kaput which means finished defeated destroyed the pragmatic presupposition of the play is snatched back from the marketplace. Here Adorno cites the following passage from Beckett's play. Clough gets up on the ladder turns a telescope on the without.
let's see zero zero and zero ham nothing stirs all is club zero ham wait till you're spoken to all is all is all is what all is what clove what all is in a word is that what you want to know just a moment he turns a telescope on a without looks lowers the telescope turns to ham corpse which in adorno's the german translation adorno's coding is kaput just to snatch the meaning of destruction from the marketplace
is to return it to its known equivalence, its unexchangeability. And this requires resting the concept of destruction free from the metaphysics of the end as accomplishment, fulfillment, or completion. But this cannot be done by overturning the sovereignty of completion and turning incompletion, understood as partial or fragmentary signification, into a new, supposedly desacralized garantor of meaning. This would endow the part with the power of expressing infinity previously attributed to the whole. But it is the power of expressing infinity, whether relayed by whole or part,
whose termination is at issue here. Metaphysical meaning, writes Adorno, has been exploded, and this explosion is historically rather than metaphysically mandated. Thus, Adorno writes, understanding endgame can mean only understanding its unintelligibility, concretely reconstructing the meaning of the fact that it has no meaning. End quote. Endgame does not represent the experience of meaninglessness Dramatizing the encounter with nothingness As if it were an eternal verity Meaninglessness is a historically meaningful fact
Not a metaphysical certainty That all is finished, including meaning Cannot be a metaphysical fact since metaphysics seals allness through meaningfulness, such that meaning and totality are two sides of the same metaphysical coin. The end of meaning cannot be inscribed within a metaphysics of the end. It marks what Adorno calls the Fall of metaphysics, which resists alignment with Heidegger's end of metaphysics. For Heidegger, the end of metaphysical meaning is epical, which is to say it is conditioned by beings' disclosive withdrawal from humanity.
For Adorno, by way of contrast, it is historical. It cannot be abstracted from the social ascendancy of capital, of which the Second World War is merely the then, in 1961, latest catastrophic symptom. This end, the radiant calamity of the enlightened earth, manifests the nadir of the dialectic of enlightenment, understood as nature's recurrence in the reason that seeks to dominate it. unbounded subjective domination binds and objectifies subjectivity under capital the identity of subject and object is no longer their reconciliation
in and through the notion it is their mutual indifference in and through the empty equivalence of the exchange abstraction which commensurates atomized consciousness and quality-dealist material. Endgame confronts us with this vacuous equivalence. Quote, as Adorno writes, In order to underbid history and thereby perhaps survive it, Endgame takes up a position at the nadir of what the construction of the subject-object laid claim to at the zenith of philosophy. Pure identity becomes the identity of what has been annihilated The identity of subject and object in a state of complete alienation
End quote Adorno then cites another exchange from Endgame in support of this claim Ham, open the window Clove, what for? Ham, I want to hear the sea Clove, you wouldn't hear it Ham, even if you open the window? Clove, no Then it's not worthwhile opening it? Clove, no Ham, violently Then open it Have you opened it? Clove, yes Adorno writes about this passage One is almost tempted to see in Ham's last then the key to the play
because it is not worthwhile to open the window because Ham cannot hear the sea perhaps it has dried up, perhaps it is no longer moving he insists that Klob open it the senselessness of an action becomes the reason for doing it a belated legitimation of Fichte's free activity for its own sake this is how contemporary actions seem and they arose a suspicion that it was never much different The logical figure of the absurd, which presents as stringent the contradictory opposite of stringency, negates all the meaningfulness logic seems to provide in order to convict logic of its own absurdity,
to convict it of using subject, predicate, and copula to lay out the non-identical as though it were identical, as though it could be accommodated with forms. It is not as a welten schoen that the absurd replaces the worldview of rationality, rather, in the absurd, that worldview comes into its own. End quote. so for Adorno rationality does not falter upon absurdity it consummates itself in it purposelessness is the sole guarantor of rational stringency conceived as pure spontaneity
but the purposelessness common to freedom and compulsion is not solely negative Their equivalence is not only to be indicted. Recognizing this commonality is also the key to breaking the spell of identity, whose compulsion perpetuates history's ensnarement in nature. Taking up a position at the nadir of the subject-object identity also offers a chance of surviving history. By underbidding history, Adorno writes, Endgame perhaps survives it In laying bare this absolute impoverishment
In rendering the disintegration of historical meaning aesthetically And therefore historically legible Endgame carves out a distance through which the calamity can be named Pointing to the nadir, it reveals its doubling in the zenith And this doubling is, I think, connected to the issue of doubling that Nadia discussed in her presentation The worst is the culmination of the doubling that has prevailed until now But naming it as the worst opens up the possibility of staving it off Where idealism would affirm the difference between zenith and nadir, endgame presents their indifference as the truth masked by their semblance of difference.
In doing so, it does not affirm indifference, rather it negates the semblance of difference. In this way, writes Adorno, Endgame moves away from the nadir only by calling its own name, as one does with a sleepwalker. The negation of negativity. End quote. Through this negation of semblance, history is made apparent, but apparent as fall. Adorno writes, quote, the only part of history that is still apparent is its outcome. For, the German is, Verfall. End quote. This difference between fall and decline is worth marking.
It distinguishes negative dialectics from metaphysical pessimism. Pessimism is reactionary because it enshrines negativity as principle. All change is deterioration. but the negation of negativity which Adorno sees exemplified in Endgame dissolves its metaphysical reification whose affirmation of continual deterioration merely contradicts idealism's affirmation of continual progression whether as progressive or regressive the continuity of metaphysical meaning is maintained. By way of contrast, Endgame's negation of
negativity denies the difference between progressive apex and regressive nadir without affirming their indifference. Its denial registers their distinction but only in negative, not as a positive data. Thus, Endgame does not hypocritically lament a collapse of zenith onto nadir whose inevitability it has already secretly affirmed. Where decline implies the inevitable sequel to a prior state of organic fruition, falling figures a movement in which the division between origin and terminus appears inseparable from their indivision. If the concept of verfall is, as Adorno insists in negative dialectics,
quote, the secular category pure and simple, then there is no fall from grace, and this for the same reason as there is no metaphysical difference between first and second nature, or the given and the made. Second nature, or what we have made, writes Adorno, is in truth first nature, what we take to be given, which is to say it is fatality. But falling is not fatality because it first makes apparent the difference between fate and freedom, or fatality and redemption. Falling unites progress and regress, rendering their indivisibility apparent, not as
something given to us, but as something we have made. It reveals the meaninglessness of what has passed for history up until now. What we know as history is only prehistory, which is to say nature once again. But this failure of realization is not a fatality to be affirmed precisely because it reveals the possibility of history, and therefore of freedom, to depend upon the negation of negativity. Negating is a doing. To take the difference between zenith and nadir as given is to render it indifferent. But recognizing that it is we who have made it indifferent by
taking it as given is what allows us to make it different. Yet to allow something is not thereby to realize it. Freedom is possible, but its realization is blocked by the unfreedom of what is actual. Society as fatality, ordained by the rule of capital. Rationality persists as possibility, not despite but because of the impossibility of its actuality. This hiatus between reasons, actuality and possibility is fundamental to Adorno's quarrel with Hegel. Adorno's 1962 essay on the concept of progress,
delivered the year after the essay on Endgame, pushes further the suggestion that liberation is enciphered within domination, just as reason is harbored by unreason. Adorno credits Kant with the insight that unfreedom is the condition for freedom. This is Adorno from the Progress essay. when in the most sublime passage of his philosophy of history Kant teaches that the antagonism the entanglement of progress in myth in nature's hold upon the domination of nature in short in the realm of unfreedom tends by means of its own law towards the realm of freedom
Hegel's cunning of reason later comes out of this then this says nothing less than that the conditions for the possibility of reconciliation are its contradiction, and that the conditions for the possibility of freedom are unfreedom. End quote. Adorno's mention of conditions of possibility is significant here. Conditions of possibility are in us, not in things themselves. They are subjective conditions for phenomena, not objective properties of noumena. Thus, when Adorno paraphrases Kant to the effect that antagonism is the condition for the possibility of reconciliation,
and that unfreedom is the condition for the possibility of freedom, he situates this antagonism and this unfreedom in us, not in things themselves. They are man-made social phenomena, not God-given transcendent realities. The coercive and antagonistic nature of capitalist society is of our own doing. Part of Adorno's point is that recognizing this facticity allows us to see that it could be changed. Allowance here is a minimal condition. it is at least possible to change these phenomena. But of course, knowing that something could be otherwise
does not suffice for us to make it otherwise. It does not compel us to act. Thus, the self-reflection through which reason recognizes that what it took to be given has been made by it, that it is itself the nature from which it seeks to emancipate itself, that nature continues to dominate it through the domination which it exerts against nature, this perpetuates the autarchy of spirits unless it is supplemented by a practical act. Thus Adorno writes, quote, The beneficial self-reflection of reason, however, would be its transition to praxis.
Reason would see through itself as a moment of praxis and would recognize, instead of mistaking itself for the absolute, that it is a mode of behavior. The anti-mythological element in progress cannot be conceived without the practical act that reigns in the delusion of spirit's autarchy. End quote. This suggests that while reflection is the element within which the dialectic of enlightenment is cognized, it is not the medium within which it can be overthrown. The element of transformation remains the social actuality, the bad totality of capital, from which reflection has become historically estranged.
Thus, it is the oppressive forces and conditions wrought by the domination of nature that must be resorted to in the attempt to overcome that domination. More pointedly, Adorno points to regression itself as the condition of progression The progress of catastrophe and the wreckage of history watched over by Benjamin's impotent angel are in fact the only resource for the aversion of disaster and the inception of humanity Here's a final quote from Adorno Part of the dialectic of progress is that historical setbacks, which themselves are instigated by the principle of progress, also provide the condition needed for humanity to find the means to avert them in the future.
The nexus of deception surrounding progress reaches beyond itself. It is mediated to that order in which the category of progress would first gain its justification, in that the devastation wrought by progress can be made good again, if at all, only by its own forces, only by its own forces, never by the restoration of the preceding conditions that were its victim. End quote. The realization of progress, understood as freedom from domination, would coincide with the abolition of progress, understood as the domination of first and second nature.
But if the domination of domination, also known as the dictatorship of the proletariat, is no longer a condition for communism, since it perpetuates what it is supposed to abolish, what practical act could realize the possibility of overthrowing domination? Reflection demythologizes the actual by exposing its subjective facticity. Since what is has been made so by us, the possibilities latent in its actuality have also been shaped by our activities. But this is not to say that reflection would suffice to render the world wholly amenable to reason.
Reflection itself relays compulsive identification, as Adorno insists in negative dialectics. So for change to be possible, we would have to change the practices that shape thinking together with the thinking that shapes those practices. And this would be an impossible task were it not for the fact that in reproducing itself, the social totality reproduces the contradictoriness that stymies it as totality. This is the residue of negativity that must be negated. not just to prevent the reproduction of totality, but to transform it. This negation is the missing link between reflection and practice.
Yet Adorno either will not or cannot specify the determination that would render negation practically transformative. He re-articulates the split between immanence and transcendent possibility on one hand, along with a distinction between knowledge and practice on the other. The possibilities recognized by identifying cognition harbor an unrecognized underside. This is not a reservoir of transcendent metaphysical possibility. Rather, it is constituted by the residue of non-identity within every identification. Conversely, the knowledge governed by identity is conditioned by unidentified utilities exchange,
while the practice compelled by utility is conditioned by pointless identifications or equivalences. Thus, knowledge is hemmed in by practical imperatives to which it is blind, just as practice is constrained by cognitive imperatives dictated by social utility. Neither knowledge nor practice exhausts the domain of the possible. But while the difference between the actual and the possible transcends cognitive and practical identification, it does not transcend reflection. Reflection rescues the residue of possibility secreted by the contradictoriness of the actual.
But so long as it is bound only to point to negativity while resisting the compulsive affirmation of the actual, the question remains whether reflection enables or disables the negation of negativity in practice. Thank you.