> Unlike Zizek here, I think that the Kantian pleasure of
duty is more subtle & perverse: 'you must do your duty,
_because_ you don't enjoy it.'
?? This isn't Kant. There are two issues here. First, whether this reading of Kant is correct on Kant's terms, second, if this reading of Kant follows by implication.
Kant's moral law is ground in his understanding of love. He translates this as respect, which entails both love and fear (of God). Happiness irrelevant in one's decision to respect the moral law, but Kant cannot conceive of happiness outside of the moral law: "the hightest goal of the moral perfection of finite creatrues, never completely attainable by human beings, is... the love of the Law... in conformity with this idea, "God is love." (Religion, Cambridge ed., 146).
Kant would *never* maintain that loving God is not (ultimately) enjoyable. So I think Zizek's reading is correct. Especiall considering that Zizek is reading the law of love through Lacan (with Sade) through Freud.
As Freud notes in Civ and Dis, loving thy neighbour leads to a twofold paradox: pleasure & trauma. Then, with Lacan, we find that this trauma is based on Kant's notion of duty. One must do one's duty for the sake of duty alone (love for the sake of love). But more than this, one must love throughout. So the position that one is stuck in is this: you are expected to love your neighbour and you are expected to enjoy it - because this is the will of God. Sade brings this to its logical conclusion by externalizing the law: you have the right of enjoyment over my body to do anything you wish and I have the right of enjoyment over your body to do anything I wish. In other words - Sade renders "the love of God, the love of the law" as "do whatever you wish - ENJOY." And we find here, at the centre, jouissance (the word enjoyment doesn't capture it). Jouissance is both pleasure and trauma. Love thy neighbour. But what if my neighbour wants me to do horrible things to him? Then one is obligated to do horrible things... love & trauma.
What Kant does not see in this is how his rejection of diabolical evil leads him directly into Sade's hands. The law of love is equally the law of hate.
For Kant, there is no content of the law prior to the law. So it is only afterward that the law receives its substance. In other words, we are required to translate an abstract and empty law into substance. In doing so, we must necessarily take responsibility for the translation - since knowledge of the law itself is part of the noumenal realm, in Lacan, the Real. So we find ourselves with an obligation but without the knowledge of what we are obliged to do. This is why, in the translation, we find ourselves feeling both responsible and guilty. We do our duty but we don't know what our duty is. Hence, ethics is a viewpoint from the perspective of radical evil - and the highest good and diabolical evil are taken to be identical.
> The nature of our moral enjoyment is twofold: (1) 'it
ain't gonna be pretty, but something has to be done about
it'; and (2) 'it's a thankless job, but someone has to do
it,' or, 'it's a thankless job, but if I don't do it,
someone else will.' The categorical imperative
here is that 'you must, or someone else must & will (and
that someone may be worse than you)!'
Where is this coming from?
On (1) - because Kant requires that there be no good prior to the law, there is no rational "claim" that "it ain't gonna be pretty'
On (2) - this is motivated by guilt and therefore a tainted maxim. Thanks or thanklessness is irrelevant to the moral law and the threat or benevolence of someone else doing it is of no consequence of Kant.
> Zizek's mistake here is severalfold: (1) he locates
freedom (or freedom that matters in ethics) in the noumenal
ethical person/transcendental ignorance (or 'impossibility
of knowledge of Things in themselves') -- a wrong
conception of freedom that erects a figment of ideology as a
vehicle of morality and that deforms freedom into a 'free
will'
Zizek is guarding against a positive definition of freedom, a freedom defined once and for all - which he regards as tyranny (because, by implication, the subject who is free acts as if they *know* what freedom is - in other words - the "free" subject takes themself to be a living embodiment of substance - and is then "free" to do whatever they wish. This would (metaphysically and dualistically) divorce freedom from any possible notion of responsibility, guilt, ethics, or morality.
> (2) he, like Kant, resolutely ignores the question of
consequences (of our actions and inactions as well as of
our attention and inattention), whereas consequences are
what weighs upon the question of morality and freedom
Actually, he doesn't do this at all. The consequences of translating the categorical imperative (imperfectly) are always guilt laden. In other words, the subject experiences trauma in the translation of the categorical imperative into the real world. There are two points to be addressed here: Zizek's Lacanain claim that subject is not substance and, second, the question of consequences as the measure of morality and freedom. If you take consequences to be the measure of freedom then you must separate freedom from an act of freedom proper. In other words, you would have to reconstruct freedom from cause and effect or contingency, which is an incoherent task - and all the while associating subjectivity with substance (which is what Zizek explicitly denies, following Lacan).
> (3) he ignores the perverse pleasure of existentialism
(i.e. 'the necessity of ethics in the face of utter
uncertainty') generated by his Lacanian-Kantian command --
'there is no excuse for _accomplishing_ one's duty!'
Not pleasure, jouissance. Simply pleasure would entail a subject having found their GOOD object. Jouissance, on the other hand, is stained with the traumatic.
> and (4) he thinks that a correct moral principle may be
devised for all purposes, for all times, which will help us
prevent 'authoritarianism.'
Absolutely not. He's working out of a psychoanalytic reading, where the categorical imperative is *not* a moral principle in the sense of having a predetermined HIGHEST GOOD or DIABOLICAL EVIL as its object. As such, it is an *internal* principle, the law of jouissance, not a political rule that will prevent authoritarianism. All Zizek accomplishes here is an outline of the constitutive elements of a moral consciousness. There is no "correct" moral principle here at all. The categorical imperative, for Zizek, is part of the dynamics of jouissance, enjoyment.
> Moreover, Zizek is incorrect in his thinking that it
takes Lacan/Kant to argue against the equation of
historical fact with historical necessity and that of these
two with moral imperative. One may break these doubled
equations through Stephen Jay Gould: evolution is
fundamentally contingent, and necessities must be thought
within this fundamental contingency. What is necessary is,
first of all, a correct ontology and full appreciation of
contingency of evolution, which Kant, Lacan, Heidegger, &
Zizek do not possess.
Radical contingency is the fundamental ontology of the Zizekian framework. To say that Zizek does not appreciate contingency is to plainly ignore the bulk of his theoretical work. On page 7 of one of the first things Zizek published in english, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek rights, "what we find in Hegel is the strongest affirmation yet of difference and contingency." Or, in Tarrying with the Negative, "Contingency does express the incompleteness of our knowledge, but this incompleteness also ontologically defines the object of knowledge itself - it bears witness to the fact taht the object itself is not yet ontologically 'realized', fully actual" (pg. 154).
> Zizek (along with Kant & Heidegger) mystifies freedom,
makes it 'transcendental,' and leads us to think of it as
freedom _from_ social relations, whereas our very agency
(moral or otherwise) exists thanks to our being embedded in
social relations, biology, and the natural world
independent of human perception, and our political project
is to create the freedom _of_ social relations (_not_ the
imaginary freedom despite, or transcendental of, social
relations).
On the contrary (you appear to me to be *seriously* misreading Zizek on this point). Zizek equates Absolute freedom with Absolute tryranny. His political philosophy, on the other hand, *recovers* freedom from this Absoluteness. He's defending a *practical* (living) understanding of freedom, one which is embedded, embodied, and practical. Zizek takes seriously the implication of freedom being freedom fron having to choose (a free entity would never have to choose between two things). Zizek demonstrates the tyranny of this perspective, which is why his understanding of freedom is *always* centred around concrete agency, contingency, and finitude.
> While Zizek's misconception of causality,
freedom, necessity, contingency, etc. is the fundamental
problem here, further comments on the problem (4) is also
necessary, for it concerns the problem of morality and
political power. (4) is an untenable position for multiple
reasons: (a) a very few of one's actions ever come to one's
individual attention as a matter of moral choice (it's
strange that someone who subscribes to the tenet of
psychoanalysis doesn't consider this problem), due to human
biology, social relations, and ideology...
Zizek is in agreement with this point. Most on one's actions are never "linguistified" - in other words - they don't appear available for comment consciously. This is why we need a critical theory of society.
> (b) 'authoritarianism' is a question of democracy or lack
thereof, not one of a correct or incorrect moral principle
Again, Zizek is in agreement with this point.
> (c) consequences of actions chosen in strict accordance
with the Lacanian-Kantian command may very well lead to
'authoritarianism'
That's Zizek's point exactly. Actions in accordance with the Kantian command *are* authoritarian (passing the 'test' = highest good / evil).
> and (d) actions taken in accordance with the very
morality that Zizek argues against -- the subjective
assumption of Historical Necessity -- may very well create
conditions that would decrease the danger of
'authoritarianism' (as you can see, [d] is the obverse of
[c]).
So if someone acts as though they are obeying the will of GOD (unto death of self and other) then this might create the conditions that would decrease the danger of authoritarianism? No. I don't see how this follows.
> In this sense, the Lacanian-Kantian command is part of
the problem, not the solution.
Let's go back to basics. What do you understand morality, freedom, or ethics to be? So far you have put your critique completely in the negative, which appears, to me, to be hiding a positive conception of "good will" or "the good" or "the right" or something.
> Lastly, there is no ethics that avoids the question
of Good; the difference between Kant and Bentham only lies
in where their ethics locate the good respectively -- a
good 'will' or a good consequence. Inflecting Kant with
Lacan doesn't change this fact.
Check out Zizek's essay, "Kant with Bentham" in Tarrying with the Negative.
"Bentham prepared the ground for the Kantian revolution by way of accomplishing the same 'purification' that Hume realized in the domain of theoretical reason... by emptying the field of the Godd of all substantial content, Bentham thus cuts the roots of every ethics founded upon a substantial, positive notion of the Spreme Good as an End-in-itself. The door was thus opened fro the Kantian revolution whose starting point is precisely the impossibility of determining the Good-in-itself within the field of possible experience. All that remains possible is therefore to conceive of the Good at the level of form, as the universal form of our will..." (pgs. 86 - 85).
BTW - Bentham's latest book was edited by one of the Slovene Lacanian School theorists - Miran Bozovic (The Panopticon Writings).
ken