>>477959In life we orient ourselves within the symbolic structure, with the "master signifier" being its pinnnacle (this is usually "God", or anything which represents the paternal authority). In life we are ingratiated within this and it shapes us to its design, but things happen in life which upset this insulated map of meaning.What we discover through trials is that our father is lacking, he is not all powerful, he is in fact castrated.
Growing up means having equality with our father and seeing the lie of his being.
In *****age years we rebel against him to affirm our own individuality (but all negation is only negation by self-relation, like how "satanists" as anti-christians attempt to "overcome" christianity, but only exist in critique, not in positivity - so hate is a mirror of love, which is why its most passionate and toxic. Of course we know about hate-*****ing and *****ual tension).
But the mystery of adulthood is returning to his visage with wiser eyes, and we see, like christ on the cross, the image of a mere man in our father. All illusions are shattered and we are met with The Real; the post-symbolic void, which is not negation (like heidegger's or sartre's notion of an abstract death), but is the unrelated substance of Being - the true "thing".
This is Trauma, where The Real is presenced in a feeling of disgust or terror, or emptiness; disillusionment - like jehovah coming to kill moses' ***** before his wife circumcised him, where the gnostic experience is not beautiful, but its opposite. Trauma then is the advent of the real thing, the inescapable "event" in political terms. Badiou calls 9/11 an event. He calls the october revolution an event.
It is the rupture of causes into a fixed effect, felt, and historicised.
But why? Because its these events which undermine the master signifier and open up a place for a "new master", as lacan conservatively warned the radicals of his time.
If all things are ideological, then trauma is the shatterer of ideology, because ideology in its context to symbolic order is a device to compensate for the father's castration.
We might otherwise say in marxist terms that every system of belief has "contradictions", and embracing these contradictions is imperative.
However, only one who is phallic can be traumatised; one who is a "true believer", but the humble man is a castrated man, one who sees that his father is a fraud.
And so the revolutionary path is in this openness to criticism, where we see our father's nakedness like ham against noah, and face the patriarch's curse.
Ideology is a property of thought which posits solutions - maybe its honest to say that there are no solutions.
Todd mcgowan posits this in his means for a "negative revolution"; an *anti-capitalism* rather than a post-capitalism, for like my original post, he sees capital as being a relation of pure positivity, where anything can be commodified - nothing is "not for sale" except being not for sale.
But this is ineffective. We cant just be critics, we must be actors, and so i see the path of action in the incitement of Reality into politics. But what can be Real today in our hyperreality, where everything is simulated? Thats the question.
Baudrillard said that the Reality principle has been abolished; that nihilism is the rational outcome of postmodernity, where we embrace purpose over play.
Zizek believes that it will be climate change which will invariably be *Eventful* as the site of a new politics. Not greta thunberg lecturing us as as she flies around in private jets - but the lived experience of global catastrophe.
In zizek's view, nature herself was born of catastrophe - the big bang is an accident, life is an accident, consciousness is an accident - so we are owed nothing.
And i tend to agree; pain is often the best teacher. Everyone can already feel the spectral currents of apocalyptic terror burdening us with trepedation. But dont forget that we are all consecutive in its becoming. No one is innocent. And so all will be guilty. Its not the end of the world, but it will be the end of everything we know.
Like marx says, revolution is the bloody birth-pangs of the new society. What will it take to overcome capitalism, i wonder..?