Symptoms

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. Immanuel Kant, Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784)

Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists or the materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels goes further than the Encyclopaedists and Feuerbach, for it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences. We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion. Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!” The Marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; it explains them, not in a materialist but in an idealist way. In modern capitalist countries these roots are mainly social. The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extra-ordinary events, such as wars, earthquakes, etc. “Fear made the gods.”Fear of the blind force of capital—blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the people—a force which at every step in the life of the proletarian and small proprietor threatens to inflict, and does inflict “sudden”, “unexpected”, “accidental” ruin, destruction, pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation—such is the root of modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and foremost, if he does not want to remain an infant-school materialist. No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way. V.I. Lenin, The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion (1909)

We are here at the very nerve center of the liberal ideology: the ruling ideology endeavors to sell us the very insecurity caused by the dismantling of the Welfare State as the opportunity for new freedoms. You have to change job every year, relying on short-term contracts instead of a long-term stable appointment? Why not see it as the liberation from the constraints of a fixed job, as the chance to reinvent yourself again and again, to become aware of and realize hidden potentials of your personality? You can no longer rely on the standard health insurance and retirement plan, so that you have to opt for additional coverage for which you have to pay? Why not perceive it as an additional opportunity to choose: either better life now or long-term security? And if this predicament causes you anxiety, the postmodern or "second modernity" ideologist will immediately accuse you of being unable to assume full freedom, of the "escape from freedom," of the immature sticking to old stable forms... Even better, when this is inscribed into the ideology of the subject as the psychological individual pregnant with natural abilities and tendencies, then I as if were automatically interpret all these changes as the results of my personality, not as the result of me being thrown around by the market forces. Slavoj Zizek, C'est mon choix... to Burn Cars (2005)

Herein, the fundamental lesson of Lacan consists. It is true that any object can occupy the empty place of the Thing, but it can do so only by means of the illusion that it was always already there, i.e., that it was not put there by us but found there as an "answer of the real." Although any object can function as the object-cause of desire, insofar as the power of fascination it exerts is not its immediate property but results from the place it occupies in the structure, we must by structural necessity fall prey to the illusion that the power of fascination belongs to the object as such. This structural necessity enables us to approach the classic Pascalian-Marxian description of the logic of "fetishistic inversion" in interpersonal relationships from a new perspective. The subjects think they treat a certain person as a king because he is already in himself a king, while in reality this person is king only insofar as the subjects treat him like one. Pascal and Marx stress the fact that the king's charisma is not an immediate property of the person-king, but a "reflexive determination" of the comportment of his subjects. To use the terms of speech-act-theory, the king is a performative effect of his subjects' symbolic ritual. The crucial point is, however, that a positive, necessary condition for this performative effect to take place is that the king's charisma be experienced precisely as an immediate property of the person-king. The moment the subjects take cognizance of the fact that the king's charisma is a performative effect of their symbolic ritual, this very effect is aborted. In other words, if we want to "subtract" the fetishistic inversion and produce the performative effect in its pure form, the performative power itself fades away. Slavoj Zizek, The Real and Its Vicissitudes (1989)

Metalanguage is not just an Imaginary entity. It is Real in the strict Lacanian sense. That is, it is impossible to occupy its position. But, Lacan adds, it is even more difficult to simply avoid it. One cannot attain it, but one also cannot escape it. That is why the only way to avoid the Real is to produce an utterance of pure metalanguage which, by its patent absurdity, materializes its own impossibility; that is, a paradoxical element which, in its very identity embodies absolute otherness, the irreparable gap, that makes it impossible to occupy a metalanguage position. For Derrida, the localization of the lack in its mark is supposed to tame the “dissemination” of the process of writing while, for Lacan, only the presence of such a paradoxical “at least one” sustains the radical dimension of the gap. Slavoj Zizek, Why Lacan is Not a "Post-Structuralist" (1987)

Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987)

Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987)

Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987)

This was not a method for instructing the people; it was a benefit to be announced to the poor: they could do everything any man could. It sufficed only to announce it. Jacotot decided to devote himself to this. He proclaimed that one could teach what one didn’t know, and that a poor and ignorant father could, if he was emancipated, conduct the education of his children, without the aid of any master explicator. And he indicated the way of that “universal teaching”— to learn something and to relate to it all the rest by this principle: all men have equal intelligence. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987)

To emancipate an ignorant person, one must be, and one need only be, emancipated oneself, that is to say, conscious of the true power of the human mind. The ignorant person will learn by himself what the master doesn't know if the master believes he can and obliges him to realize his capacity: a circle of power homologous to the circle of powerlessness that ties the student to the explicator of the old method (to be called from now on, simply, the Old Master). But the relation of forces is very particular. The circle of powerlessness is always already there: it is the very workings of the social world, hidden in the evident difference between ignorance and science. The circle of power, on the other hand, can only take effect by being made public. But it can only appear as a tautology or an absurdity. How can the learned master ever understand that he can teach what we doesn't know as successfully as what he does know? He cannot but take that increase in intellectual power as a devaluation of his science. And the ignorant one, on his side, doesn't believe himself capable of learning by himself, still less of being able to teach another ignorant person. Those excluded from the world of intelligence themselves subscribe to the verdict of their exclusion. In short, the circle of emancipation must be begun. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987)

Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987)

The minority puts a dogmatic view in place of the critical, and an idealist one in place of the materialist. They regard mere discontent, instead of real conditions, as the driving wheel of revolution. Whereas we tell the workers: You have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles, not only in order to change conditions but also to change yourselves and make yourselves capable of political rule; you, on the contrary, say: “We must come to power immediately, or else we may as well go to sleep.” Whilst we make a special point of directing the German workers’ attention to the underdeveloped state of the German proletariat, you flatter the national feeling and the status-prejudice of the German artisans in the crudest possible way—which, admittedly is more popular. Just as the word “people” has been made holy by the democrats, so the word “proletariat” has been made holy by you. Karl Marx — on the 1850 split in the German Communist League

A human being here considers himself virtuous whenever he feels himself stable in his maxims of observance to duty—though not by virtue of the supreme ground of all maxims, namely duty, but [as when], for instance, as immoderate human being converts to moderation for the sake of health; a liar to truth for the sake of reputation; an unjust human being to civic righteousness for the sake of peace or profit, etc., all in conformity with the prized principle of happiness. However, that a human being should become not merely legally good, but morally good (pleasing to God) i.e. virtuous according to the intelligible character [of virtue] (virtus noumenon) and thus in need of no other incentive to recognize a duty except the representation of duty itself—that, so long as the foundation of the maxims of the human being remains impure, cannot be effected through gradual reform but must rather be effected through a revolution in the disposition of the human being (a transition to the maxim of holiness of disposition). And so a "new man" can come about only through a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation and a change of heart. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1792)

Only one slave on Earth is enough to dishonor the freedom of all men. So the abolition of slavery is, at this hour, the supreme goal of the thinkers. Victor Hugo, 17 January 1862

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