What Withdraws from Identity?

An identity is a type of interpretation. An interpretation is a type of closer. Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous obsession with the duck / rabbit figure was how he demonstrated that there was no solid ground from which to render a final judgment about what something was because any possible ground for a judgement was itself incomplete, which Lacan put as "There is no metalanguage," and Leotard put as "There is no meta-narrative." For Deleuze, any interpretive closure, like a phenomenological objectification or an intentional conceptualization, contained the illusion of wholeness given by the appearance of a repetition, which was the illusion of "resemblance," but there was no true repetition because resemblance was the imposition of a transcendent identity onto what was ultimately immanent difference, which for Deleuze was the differential background that underlay all reality and any possible foregrounding of an objective unification. 

Lacan saw the projection of the virtual object, which he called "Objet-Petit-a" in a similar manner, as a fantasy projection of wholeness onto what was essentially incomplete, disunified, and ambiguous, like Deleuze's differential background from which any temporary repetition emerged, which Deleuze called, "Difference-in-itself." Lacan's phenomenology can be said to be that of object-small-a because it was a fantasy projection that unified a multiplicity or positivized a lack of oneness as if a one, which was the oneness imagined in Lacan's register of the Imaginary. Badiou, referring to the work of Meillassoux, called this projection of oneness the "take-as-one" function of Set Theory, in which oneness is imposed by defining what belongs in the set and what doesn't. The outside definition of a set, or its externally given intention, functions as a classical substance because it defines what it contains like a substance used to contain its attributes. 

In Kant's phenomenology, the subjective intention "synthesizes" objective phenomena via intuitive categories, and then projects these objectifications as what appears as the objective, exterior world. This intuitive synthesis accords with the general structure of the take-as-one unification because it synthesizes a one from perceptual difference, as in Whitehead's definition of a perception or a conceptualization as at least two percepts joined together according to a rule. However, this synthesis isn't complete as Hegel showed in his dialectical double negation, which didn't resolve into a synthesis but was always left with an irresolvable remainder, which could be called "irreducible ambiguity." Irreducible ambiguity might be thought of as a contradiction that cannot be resolved into a synthesis, but a nonetheless, productive irresolution. If irreducible ambiguity is what withdraws from any interpretation, then, perhaps, it is a productive withdrawal, just as the Lacanian Real is what resists symbolic identification but is also the ground of the Symbolic, or as the void is the negation whose inability to negate itself produces whatever appears as the world.

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Transcript

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We'll go back to failure is freedom. We are in the middle of outlining this problem between pure relationality and process on the one hand. And then on the other hand, we would have something like essences, the eternal forms, these things that are unchanging and immutable. So this is the classic opposition between change, a flow, and identity or essence or substance in a classical way of thinking about it. So in the Western tradition, philosophical tradition, we often think about the opposition between Heraclitus' river as a flow and as continual change versus the denial of any change, which would be Parmenides and his idea of being as immutable and change as an illusion. So on the Heraclitus side of the debate, you're going to wind up with process philosophy in general, probably most famously as articulated by Alfred North Whitehead. And you're going to have joining that structuralism, which is probably most famously by Ferdinand de Sassier, when he talked about linguistics and how in linguistics nothing is what it is in itself, but it is what it is in relations of difference, symbolic difference, a systematic difference, which is why it's a structural difference. It is a kind of like system in which everything that is is what it is in relation to what it is not. And so that we have relations of difference, and these are the binary oppositions, and we're talking about one binary opposition right now, uh, the binary opposition between a substance or an essence versus a flow. And so that the concept of a flow only makes sense in relation to uh the concept of uh something that's static, like uh a substance or an essence or an identity. And this is what uh Alfred North White had associated with uh basically all other philosophies that were not process-oriented, uh, what he called substance ontology uh ways of thinking in the world. And it is actually the sort of like natural way that we see the world uh without being sort of like tutored uh by it for many of these thinkers. Although there's some question about that. I mean, if you weren't taught to see things as static objects, uh could you like see them as continuous flows if that's what you were uh taught uh instead? Or is there sort of a natural tendency towards this uh objectification of things into uh things that are closed and not uh a flow, but like uh in some sense completed or a thing in itself, in the sense that uh it is what it is, not because of the relationship it has in a symbolic system of difference or any kind of system of difference, but because uh it is its own thing. It is a natural kind, it is a discrete entity, uh however you want to think of that. I talked a little bit about the Sorriades paradox, which in some sense is like what everything comes down to, and this is any version of the paradox of identity, in which uh, for example, uh when does uh a grain uh heap become a heap? And when is it just like a pile? And you know, at what point does it actually you know transition uh when you have these kind of like distinctions that don't have real clear thresholds and don't seem to be able to have real uh clear thresholds. So the other like very famous example that gets used is like uh you have um uh Theseus' ship. And so if you took off uh one board uh at a time from the ship and replaced it with a new board, uh, you know, eventually you would have replaced all the boards of the ship. Um at what point does it stop being Theseus' ship uh uh if it does at all? Uh and at what point uh does it actually become a different ship? Uh another version of that is like, what if you took all the pieces of wood from Theseus' ship and put it uh into a new ship that you were building? And as you took off each board from the uh old Theseus ship and replaced it with a new new board, you took the old boards and you made uh another ship after that. In essence, you would be making another ship of Theseus. Like the question is which one is the true ship of Theseus and which one is the false? If either, are they both? You know, these either these very confusing questions about uh essences or identities. And so um, whenever we are wondering, for example, like what is a person? What makes me me? What is myself? And then, you know, there's all these Buddhist, uh now kind of infamous, famous, however you want to think of them, exercises in which you can like take away all kinds of different parts of yourself. I mean, we are uh, for all intents and purposes, ships of these uh things because like each cell of our body at some point gets replaced. So, you know, in seven years we're not the same body, even if we are in some sense in the same form. Uh, you know, what is it that makes us us? Is it like what holds us together, um, our personalities, or are these just aggregations of types of intensities and you know, flows, or are they actually distinct things that make us us? These are all kinds of uh identity questions that are related to the Sorriades paradox. You know, usually people wind up with some sort of sense of self, like I am what I am, when like you know, I have my memories of who I am, I have these memories of continuity. Um, you know, that's you know, me, that's myself. I'm somehow, you know, held together by these memories. But then what happens, of course, when somebody, you know, goes to the nursing home to visit, you know, their grandma with you know severe dementia or or Alzheimer's or something like that. What happens then? You know, is that still my grandma or is that somebody else? You know, some people, their first instinct is to say, you know, that's not my grandma anymore. She doesn't recognize me, she doesn't even know who she is. Um, and then you know, there are other people that say, of course that's still, you know, my grandma, or of course that's still whoever that is. Um, you know, and then you know, you get into all kinds of questions of identity, and they're all around this um binary opposition that we're talking about today, which is really between, you know, an actual, sometimes called natural kind, uh, an essence, uh a substantial, like, I don't know, ontology that doesn't change over time, even through change, it's the part of you that's consistent. So you you do change, of course, but there's this, you know, internal consistency that like doesn't, you know, fade or doesn't like you know, I don't know, transform itself so much that it becomes something else. So that are we uh on the other hand, just these processual flows, you know, as you know, process would have it, in this just continual, you know, relational identity that is always changing because uh relations are always changing, and this is the structuralism bit. And then, you know, the way this is incorporated into structuralism, at least the way I understand it through um Lacan, the change bit, it's like, oh, structure, that's gonna be something that's you know completely solid, but it's not because it's all it's this uh relational uh thing that doesn't have any solidity to it, it's just like based completely uh on you know whatever the thing is not. So like I understand you know the uh signifier uh good because I understand evil, uh, but they can't be understood in isolation, they uh co-arise together. And then when we see this sort of failure of identity uh within structuralism, which is the failure of a thing to be what it is, like a failure for uh A to equal A, for the signifier to be the thing itself, so or the signifier to disclose the thing itself. Like we see that there's always this part that withdraws uh from the signification, from the representation, from the symbolization. This thing that withdraws or resists symbolization is what Lacan calls the real. But it is this real, uh this failure to um symbolize, this failure to represent, this failure to identify, this irreducible ambiguity. This is what allows everything to move, change, and flow. So it is creation, production, making new, renewal through failure, really, the failure to identify, or you could say the excess that's given by irreducible ambiguity. So in Lacan, you wind up with a very interesting binary opposition between lack and excess. Uh, and as with all binary uh oppositions, they co-arise so that one uh gives uh the other uh to itself, so that you have uh lack um is um coincidental uh with excess uh and vice versa. So is the ultimate resistance of uh the real to symbolization is that an in itself? No, you know, for Lacan that is not, that is just a simple, you know, structural failure internal to the symbolic itself, which is why his structuralism uh has at the middle part of it that is not only its failure, it's also what constitutes it, which is its lack. Uh and so the question then becomes in what sense is this lack an excess? Well, it is an excess because there is, in some sense, too much to be represented, too much to be symbolized for the you know structuralism uh of language, uh of identity, of the concept of identity, uh, which is the concept of making something whole uh in itself uh as an object of some kind. This would be a concept that discloses the full, in a full way, you know, what something is in an A for A kind of a way. This is like, in many ways, you can say, you know, anthropologically, if you were gonna figure out like what is the purpose of the symbolic, what is the purpose of language and all these, you know, cultural um norms and laws, and what is the point of uh law and just the point of all this kind of stuff. It is uh, you know, uncertainty reduction in in line with the modern anthropological notion of you know our brains and our you know culture and everything, uh ultimately in the service of reducing uncertainty. So that, you know, what's the symbolic for? It's for naming things, it's for making whole and complete objects uh out of the concepts that we have for the world, so that those things, uh once so named, once so identified, once so objectified, uh they become uh knowable. And in this, you know, identifiable, knowable kind of register, um, which is the imaginary, they are imagined um in such a way to make our predictions about the world, how things are gonna go uh more um accurate, so that you know we're really judging our symbolic efficacy uh according to the criteria of you know evolutionary biology, which is you know survival and reproduction. But then once you know the world has been named and labeled and we know what everything is and uncertainty has been reduced, you know, we would have a completely static sort of, you know, according to evolutionary biology, that's what we're looking for, anyways. We're looking for some sort of high above equilibrium homeostasis. I mean, that's what we're trying to reduce uncertainty for, so that we can, you know, feed ourselves basically and pass on our genes, but we never really achieve because of the real, we never really achieve this perfect predictability, we never really achieve this state of like perfect homeostasic, homeostatic relation uh within our body, with itself, and then with the out external environment, because there's always these um failures to identify correctly. And what's more, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, at any rate, because he uh is an adherent of the Freudian death drive, if there is too much certainty, uh the death drive, this internal part of us that is our internalization of this real um is going to uh you know make things um unrecognizable and take these uh identities uh and confuse them. Uh this is like sort of like if you know the life drives, uh whatever those might be, uh Freud didn't really theorize that, he theorized the pleasure principle, but like uh those things that reduce uncertainty, you know, and serve like the homeostatic, you know, drive of the drive of life, which seems to be to like preserve that high above equilibrium homeostasis, uh, even amidst you know all kinds of external flux. But if there is too much predictability, uh death drive will kick in and it will undermine things to make it uh uncertain again. Now, from a like free energy principle way of thinking about uh death drive, they just like would reduce the death drive not to an actual desire for uncertainty, but a desire to learn so that you would enter uh uncertain circumstances in order to, in the end, again, serve this high above equilibrium uh homeostasis uh by learning more about the environment so that in the end your predictions can be more accurate, but you just need to, you know, like enter into these uncertain states uh in order to basically have more control. There is no actual death drive like Freudian death drive, Lacanian death drive, in which there is this desire to not be in control, this actual drive uh to be um in a kind of like open ambiguity, like a sublimity where there is just all this vertigo of uh indeterminacy. That's not for its own sake. That is not, you know, like what uh any drive can possibly be uh in this, you know, like idea that we're always trying to reduce free energy and all the rest of this kind of stuff, which basically means that we're trying to um you know reduce uh entropy. We're trying to stop the the you know the process at least temporarily. I mean that's what high above equilibrium homeostasis is. Like the homeostasis part uh is the equilibrium that is resisting uh entropy, whereas you know, the um high above equilibrium part is like uh ironically, our resistance to entropy like increases entropy like quite a bit because it requires all this energy. It's kind of like the famous example of the air conditioning. It's like if you want the world to be cooler in general, then you would not put on an air conditioner. The AC actually creates a lot more heat net uh overall, uh even though it cools down some you know local area, you know, in your house or in a building or something like that. But it you know heats up uh the rest of the you know environment because it produces heat in order to do that, which is of course the second law of thermodynamics, and that is what entropy is and does. And the arrow of time is you know often defined, you know, through entropy and this increase of entropy, and ultimately because homeostasis uh is a resistance to entropy, it can only ever be a temporary resistance, as we talk about the ultimate heat death of the universe, is because the arrow of time, the arrow of entropy is only pointing in one direction in the end, but we actually wind up increasing um the amount of entropy by trying to resist it. So it's this futile thing in the end, and you just kind of like wind up wondering like, all right, so like what is life's strategy here in the end? And in the end, it doesn't and can't have any strategy because the uh ratio of non-being to being, the ratio of space energy to matter, uh, is uh ultimately you know greater than matter's resistance to space uh energy. So one way we can think about lack, Lacanian lack, is to think about there is too much uh being to um hold together with one intention. Now this is the lack of self-mastery that Lacan often talks about in relation to lack, that we are not able to intend one thing. Uh this is the victory ultimately of multiplicity over the one, so that we are you know headed uh in that direction as you know entropy increases. So that you can think about the real, you can think about lack uh as a positive, a uh positive force in the sense that uh it is a uh active resistance uh to uh intention, to uh symbolization. That isn't just uh exterior to us, but is interior to us in the form of our unconscious. So again, the unconscious is like the failure, it's just the real, it's just the structural failure in a sense, uh to hold ourselves together as a one, so that it's all the parts of ourselves that we cannot intend. In other words, it's everything that the uh ego is not under control over. And so famously, parapraxes like slips, ticks, omissions, and then the um, you know, royal road of dreams for Freud or stream of consciousness uh, you know, used as a kind of vehicle to get at the unconscious or the real. I mean, it's always bursting forward uh outside of our control. This is the lack of self-mastery that the ego loaths and the ego disavows, and that, you know, for the most part, you know, tries to hold together and tries to make one not see. But one, you know, slips, uh, omits something, forgets something, says something, uh, has some sort of bizarre tick. Um, these things are all signs that one is not holding oneself together. Uh, and then the entire point of Freudian dream analysis is to expose all the intentions that the ego wants to deny, all the ways in which the intention is not a one, the ego is not a one, uh, the intention and your intentions are multiple and that they are contradictory, and that you do not just love but you hate, and you do not just um desire, but you also are repulsed by or disgusted by. Um, so these are all the things that you can't admit to yourself uh because it would have such a deleterious effect uh on your sense of self. Um, you know, and then in a kind of Jungian way, you'd have to learn how to integrate these things because these are all the shadows that you don't want to look at, this kind of shadow work in Young, where you have to integrate these things by acknowledging them. Um that these are all the things that you would have to do. I always love when people, you know, talk about the yin and yin-yang this way, which is like these things co-rise, so that's a sort of like Eastern philosophical like uh staple that you know the good and the bad like sort of give birth to each other, the yin and the yang, whatever. Uh, but you know, the thing that often gets pointed out, which is really good, is that these little like dots in each side uh of both the yin and the yang uh of the other, so that you know each one is composed and constituted and still contains um the um part of itself that is uh defined as you know not itself, so that there is no In itself, there is no uncontaminated purity. And I mentioned last time that, you know, within theological debates, especially in the West, there's always been this idea of like purity, of like the good as unadulterated good, not reliant on the bad. The bad is only an unnecessary parasite, and the good could exist without the bad and these kinds of things. And so this is again this desire for a substantial reality, substance ontology. Things are what they are, and they don't have this sort of mixing. They don't have this sort of defilement of otherness within them. But this is the whole binary opposition that we get into in process in the Sorieties paradox. This is the whole thing that we get into when we get into structuralism, because within structuralism, you know, Lacan is trying to show the relation between the having of the symbolic structure of difference versus what can't be had or what resists being known, what resists the symbolic altogether, which is the real. So you can't have a symbolic if you don't have the resistance to the symbolic in the real. They co-arise with each other. Whatever successful identifications the symbolic contains, in whatever ways it helps you to reduce uncertainty, what it arises from, what it co-arises with is uncertainty and the resistance to identification, the resistance to the categories, concepts, signifiers of the symbolic, each giving life to the other or each giving death to each other. So another way to understand this, and I think this is going to be the ultimate way when we're thinking about identity and how identity is like this desire to know the world, to reduce the uncertainty of the world, to reduce the ambiguity of the world, so that that's you know what the symbolic is on the side of. It is on the side of identification, uh, it is on the side of substance ontology of essences and all the rest of that stuff. It may or may not be the natural stance, but it is or it does seem to be like what human beings uh try to do naturally without too much influence, which is to uh reduce uh uncertainty and name things. I mean, uh in mythology, but of course, like you know, Adam naming the animals is a famous example of like this sort of initial human uh impulse to put names on things and label things. Uh you know, this is like the whole present debate about is it natural for babies to stereotype or to recognize difference in this kind of stuff? And seems to be like, yeah, it is, uh, because like this is what we do. We make distinctions. We make distinctions ultimately between self and other. And so this is the sort of like binary opposition that we would want to talk about anytime we're gonna talk about like, is there a knowable essence or substance of something, or uh is you know, reality, the world ultimately unknowable? Is it irreducibly uh ambiguous? So, whatever you know success the symbolic has uh at granting an identity, it's this sort of temporary victory uh of reducing uh uncertainty, of reducing ambiguity to a nameable concept, identity, signifier, whatever. And we can well imagine as C.S. Pierce did and uh Terence Deakin, uh modern day, I don't know, it's Pearcyan in some sense. I mean, he's more than that, but he also has thought about like the origins of this of the signifier, of the symbolic. Uh, and if you start off as Pierce does and as Deakin does with a sign, so this is something that indicates and what we call an indexical relation to something that is not presently there, uh, but something that is indicated. This is the index part of it. Um, so this is uh something that is um not presently there, but like it's the a sign of uh the relative proximity of it. So like if I'm an early hunter and I see the scat of my prey, I can look at it and see how fresh it is, and it it's like a sign, it indicates you know something about you know what I'm either hunting or being hunted by or something like that. So it operates as an index basically. It indicates, uh, gives me information. Yes, it reduces uncertainty for sure. And then we have this other one that's actually pretty weird to me. Um, and it's the sign that C.S. Pierce calls uh the icon. So it's a little bit different. Well, it's a lot bit different to me to the um index uh because it uh index has this kind of like part-to-hole relation, like a piece of shit and you know, whatever animal shat it, or another you know, common example, smoke and fire, so you can see the smoke uh on the horizon, and where there's smoke, there must be fire. That's a kind of indexical kind of thing. And then there's this weirder sign, which is the um icon, uh, and the icon is like has this resemblance to the thing. Um, and you know, for Pierce uh and for Deacon, that's that's like uh a more primary kind of relationship because it like looks like the thing or whatever. To me personally, I think like there's less of an obvious relation and more of a conceptual relationship there. So, you know, for Deacon, he just talks about how like this uh sign is like making something that's absent present. Um, and I think like making something absent present through um resemblance, uh through the resemblance uh of what he calls the icon because it has it it looks in some ways like the thing. I think that's actually to me more abstract than like um you know looking at some shit and deciding that an animal was there at some point. Which brings me to my favorite pebble uh of all time, the Macapanzgat pebble or however it's pronounced. I don't know, I've never actually heard it pronounced. But anyways, it's this pebble that was found supposedly about you know three million years old, and uh it would have been um you know associated with a site that had something to do with Australopithecus, which is uh obviously an early hominid that was upright but had the same brain size as like uh a modern-day chimp or something like that. So something that we certainly wouldn't imagine was able to represent then symbolically through um, you know, that kind of a symbolic representation. I don't know, and I'm there's I'm sure there's some experiment you could run to do this, and maybe it's already been done, but it would just seem to me that most chimpanzees could see you know some other animal's shit and know that that animal was nearby uh before they could pick up a pebble that sort of looks like a human face, it sort of looks like that eyes and like a little weird like grin on it or something, and decide that this looks like a person. I'm gonna take this pebble back to my little um you know cave or whatever. It probably doesn't matter, but it just strikes me that that is a more advanced sort of a move. And you know, this again is probably some bullshit. They found a red pebble, uh South Africa, uh, in this three million-year-old um, you know, site uh where very early hominids uh, you know, had been found, uh, and decided that one of them had seen this pebble uh down by a nearby river and brought it back because uh they selected this pebble, not because of use of any kind, uh, but they selected this pebble because it resembles a human face or I mean guess whatever, a authoropithecus face uh face, sorry, um or something like that. And so they saw you know their own sort of like um resemblance in there, uh, and in this iconographic uh logic, uh, you know, selected that pebble and took it back to you know where they were at because it was, I don't know, uh artful or interesting or something like that. Whether that story is true or not, uh doesn't matter to the point that this is you know this uh relation of a sign uh that uh Pierce thought of as the iconographic. Uh and Deakin does seem to agree uh with Pierce that that's somehow more basic than you know uh realizing that you know smoke indicates a fire or something like that. But notice they're both forms of the subjunctive uh in the sense that they are talking either about like a hypothetical situation or they're imagining a situation that isn't directly in front of the face of whoever is sort of like projecting uh into this is Pierce's idea of abduction. This is a really interesting original idea that he came up with. You know, people already knew about uh deduction and induction and all that kind of stuff, but abduction actually requires a sort of like sense of the whole scene, um, and you kind of are like filling in theory uh as to you know different possibilities and weighing which one is you know probably right or whatever. It's like this incredible ability to you know project uh into uh a situation, uh imagination, uh uh, you know, filling in the blank in a kind of uh just amazing um way that shows like this incredible uh ability to like see um you know holes uh where there are you know uh holes where there are you know H-O-L-E-S holes. So seeing a hole where there are holes or seeing a W H O L E hole where there are holes, H-O-L-E-S in your information. And really both signs, uh whether it's the indexical or the iconographic or the icon, whatever, um, do that. Um and then there's like this uh incredible leap and what a lot of people call a signifier and just what Pierce calls the symbol, uh, which is able to, you know, represent something that's absent in an arbitrary symbolic system of differences. So that you know, famously this is the Sassyrian idea that a dog has nothing to do with the phonemes or the sound that we make when we make the sound dog because it's like some other sound in other languages, like there is no necessary relation. So this is a completely imagined relationship. Talk about the ability to project uh into uh something uh when you don't have you know anything. This is like projecting into the void uh so that you are able to present something from the void from the complete absence of the thing. You can be talking about dogs and possible situations with dogs and the subjunctive uh in a way that, you know, as far as we know, no other non-human animals can do. Uh so that, yes, uh non-human animals may have language to some degree. Um, they can uh use language though as um a sign uh in the iconographic sense, like so there does seem to be some ability to recognize things that resemble uh things, like pictures of bananas or something like that. And there also is uh the ability to recognize like part-to-hole relations, so that you know, if you see a scat, then it means this animal uh is present or whatever, or you know, like when they teach animals to like press a button through operant conditioning to get like pellets or whatever, there does seem to be an ability to relate some uh abstract sign um to like a direct presencing of some kind of you know food pellets or whatever the heck. And you know, I hear that parrots can you know use you know sentences and sentence stems and words and appropriate or semi-appropriate situations that seem responsive uh to human language and that kind of stuff, and appropriately responsive, but this is not ever in the subjunctive. This is not, these are signs, these are never what is called in modern semiotics uh signifiers. There is some leap with signifiers into the uh subjunctive, the purely hypothetical, um, that is not possible um in other non-human-animal uh language. And one way that you might understand uh this uh leap into the uh subjunctive uh is in this relation between uh the uh void, uh the abyss, uh nothing uh and something. Um and so that you are able to project into this lack. Uh and this is another way in which excess is coincidental with lack, is that uh you know, for human language or for human beings, uh this lack uh is this uh excess of space uh so that you can have this um increasing distantiation uh between um identification, between certainty, between things in themselves and things as they are, and A for A relations, you can have this increasingly uh distant. Uh Terrence Deakin will talk about this increasing distance between, you know, for him, resemblance is first, so like there's less distance between this looks like that uh than there is between this scat, this part represents the whole of whatever animal. So you're getting this increasing distance that you can project into imaginally, symbolically, uh, with signifiers. Uh, but there is this just unbelievable, like impossible to truly recount the origins of leap uh into the subjunctive, um, into abductive thinking, which is uh the Lacanian register of the imaginal, which is or the imaginary, where you are imagining things uh whole and complete, or you know, no, you know, seeing uh what would fill in this lack um and imagining and projecting it, that's object small a, projecting that into that lack. Um, this is the sense in which everything is object small a uh when you are you know projecting uh the signifier. Once you're into the signifier, you are always projecting, abducting into this uh lack. And this is the excess because why are you doing that? You're doing that because of an excess uh of space, like too much indeterminacy to determine. So it can't be determined uh in some sense because of the ultimate resistance of the real. It's it's truly indeterminate. Um, and so like what do you have to do? You have to project uh object small a, you have to project this virtual uh object, which is you know this objective, that's not the right word, I just made that up, but it comes from uh the lore with the word abduction, let's say, uh, as I'm going the and the eject part is like the project it in it. So it's like a the object small a is this virtual projection uh into the lack. And then again, this is not uh a lack of anything, really, it's an excess uh yes, of space, but also uh an excess of non-being uh is also uh reflective of an excess of being. So you can think of this excess um as too much to symbolize, so that that's the you know, failure in a positive way. That's the failure of the symbolic in the real. It's just like too much to be symbolized. There's always this moreness uh to being, uh, which is actually ironically or not ironically, but is because of the the moreness, the always moreness of of non-being, and the way that non-being gives more being because they co-arise together. In this sense, specifically, uh if you uh, you know, whatever imaginary objects are, uh are they is is that being like what is their ontological status? So is that more being or or whatever? I mean, uh for me it is because that is, you know, the imaginary has this aspect uh like anything else, uh, in which it is, you know, ontologically substantial. So that's sort of the irony of the whole thing. But really, this is just like saying uh possibilities uh do they have any ontological status, which I definitely think is pretty well accepted that they do. They might not be like as like to use real in a different sense, uh, you know, the solid objects that you see in front of you or whatever, uh, but possibility spaces, you know, have this ontological presence in a sense. Um of course, it's through their uh absence. It's an ontology, like all ontology, it's being through non-being, um, so that each gives uh more of everything to each other, which will allow us to finally kind of uh wrap it up here for now uh with this relation between uh self and other, which is the relation um that gives the self through the other, or what is sometimes uh said, especially like in a Levitassian way, uh, the self as the other. So that we become ourselves through otherness. So we become internal through the external, through the external in us and through you know other people as well. Uh, we become internal, we internalize the external. This is that extimacy uh that we've talked about many a times within uh within uh Lacanian thought. Object small A is a projection, so it's from uh within me that I project onto an external reality. However, uh it is my projection of a perceived uh external other uh and trying to fill that unknown externality, that otherness in with knowing, in with uh essence, identification, substance, objectification, so that like every time I make an identification, I am projecting uh into uh I'm projecting signifiers, concepts, uh, objects uh into the world uh that aren't you know really there in some ultimate sense, in the exact sense that you know David Hume meant when he said like my perception of causal relations is a projection. I can't actually see causes. So causes and when I see causality, when I see causal relations, uh I am in the imaginary register. Uh when I see objects, I am in the imaginary register, because there are no complete objectifications that are just out there ready to hand. They are things that are given to me, yes, through the other. They are given to me through the symbolic that comes to me from outside of me. The symbolic is not internal to me, but I internalize it and it becomes this internal otherness within me that I then project back outwards again. And so that there's this constant reciprocal relation between self and other because the other, the big other, uh, and the symbolic gives me myself. Uh, and the failure of the big other, the failure of the symbolic is also internalized me as my unconscious and as my singularity. And actually, what makes me me more than just a reproduction of the symbolic that was given to me by the external big other, that what makes my internality uh unique is my failure to uh completely internalize uh and map A4A relations of the big other symbolic uh into my body. So I do swallow uh the signifier and integrate the signifier into my flesh. Uh but this integration is never complete. And so that, and here's the excess bit again: my flesh is always more uh than can be signified, which is you know just this Marion's kind of point about saturated phenomenon, that there's always more affective, unnameable uh ambiguity that cannot be uh reduced. Uh it's this over uh proximal um sort of like uh non-reducible um uh intuition that uh can't be reduced by the intention because like I cannot make it conceptual. I cannot identify it, I cannot objectify it so that all of my objectifications, all of my identifications are incomplete, and that's the failure of the real that allows uh whatever new things to come into being to come into being, and that ultimately is that flow so that. Every one, every attempt to make a one as an identification or as an object, there is also the failure of that objectification, the failure of that symbolization, the failure of that representation that Lacan called the real. So I become myself by failing to be myself, by being other than myself is the ground of myself. So that self and other is uh this ultimate sort of like relationship of co-orising that allows whatever uh I can know to be known through unknowing or through the unknowable other, through the exterior, uh in this constant like uh flow uh of self, the failure to be self, uh the otherness that I cannot uh make internal, that I cannot understand, that I cannot conceptualize, that allows for there to be conceptualization at all. The real uh is in a like perfectly uh symbiotic relation with the symbolic. So if the real is the failure of the symbolic, it is also the uh ground of the symbolic. Just as you know, I wouldn't know what the real was without the symbolic's failure. So I need the symbolic again to have the real. The real doesn't mean anything without the symbolic, without making the symbolic fail, uh or whatever. Like myself, I am not a I am not a self. I mean, this is the very obvious point, like uh there is no individual uh without the community, without the others. Like there is no like uh Ann Randian, you know, uh autonomous self. Uh there is no Anne Randian A equals a uh idiocy. There is only this relation of self to the failure of self, uh, which is the otherness, to the failure to and make intentional or conceptual uh which is uh the outside other. So then again, what is uh trans identity? You've got two you've got the uh juxtaposition of identity uh and transition or flow like put uh you know together, and that is like what uh identity is. It is this relationship between what cannot be said, what the big other cannot tell me who I am, kind of a thing, so that like when the you know trans person says like I am not what you say that I am, there is this great moment of failure of the symbolic. You don't get to tell me what I am or whatever. But this uh failure to identify, then uh you can have you can go one of two ways with it. You can say, like, that's not the right ident identity, this other thing is the right identity. And so then there's this closure, uh, there's this imaginary, like um whole incompleteness. So like this is what I actually am, this is my essence or whatever. This is my object small a realized. But the problem is, is if we ever realize or possess or have our object small a, uh, at least for Lacan, um it's not something that actually satisfies because it can't actually be had even. Uh it is something that we have abducted, you know, into the void um and have projected into this lack, uh this lack of information. Like we don't know what we are, but we know we're not what you say we are uh because of this sense of failure. Uh, but you know, like we are this other thing then means like, well then I've got this object that I can have and I can be and I can whatever. Uh it's you know, beyond just some mere symbolic system of difference, it is like this in itself. Uh and once I have this thing, uh and once this thing is acknowledged or whatever, and once I discover this thing about myself, like my true self, this is what I actually am, and once I understood that, then I, you know, then I was fine. Um, it's just like you know, the uh big other doesn't acknowledge it, that's fine, but I know you know what I am. The problem is that if you have that sort of uh identity, if you have that sort of having, that sort of object, um that is um always a mistake in Lacanian um psychoanalysis. That's basically the mistake of the phallus, or perhaps that doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's like the phallus for Lacan, understood very uh uh symbolically, metaphorically, whatever, uh is you know believing in uh an actual uh position, identity, an actual whatever is like uh can you know can be obtained and once you have it then you're you're done. You've got the thing or whatever. That's that's the mistake. Um it's also called the all position or the male position in in Lacan because there is this belief that it's complete. You you have it all now. Um but like obviously in the Kenyan psychoanalysis uh the transposition that Zizek prefers is like always um incomplete. So that that's what trans means. It means a transition, always this position of flow. Um so that uh the trans identity um holds together uh a binary opposition um that is fruitful and productive, and that's what everybody basically should be. Um there's it should be the identity uh plus the identity's failure uh as it is for everybody. But I've just been really trying to figure out lately because it is very um difficult because like it does really seem uh just you know from personal experiences, meeting people, uh conversations with people, that um this really is an in itself uh for some people, not for all people who uh claim the moniker trans, but like that they're not, you know, uh in the middle. Uh they're not ambiguous. They are, you know, masculine or feminine, it's just that's not what they were assigned at birth uh by the doctor. And so we are now back to a situation of uh substance ontology, and uh frankly I'm kind of like buying it, and it makes it makes sense, and it just like really like has made me um question like um okay, is there still room uh for an in-itself? And and this is uh what what I was saying last time about how Graham Harmon really makes this uh clear, uh you know, when he talks about you know structuralism and um uh process, on the one hand, you know, everything defined relationally uh through difference, um, you know, something withdraws from that. What is it? It's the in itself. It's this essence, uh, this thing that resists relationality. So um, you know, we are uh at the stopping point, unfortunately, because I just could go on uh with my kind of uh trying to figure this out. Um it can't be figured out because of the real, but like I still want to figure out a way to talk about it better than I do already. Um I would like to be able to do it without resorting back to identities and essences and stuff like that, except as a sort of like temporary closure that uh everybody acknowledges is not like substantial, but um I don't know, like there may really be an essence. So, like uh theologically, this would be the position of like uh there really is a good in itself, and it really makes sense when you think about evil, because there really does seem to be an evil in itself. There's no like if, ands, or buts about you know chattel slavery or the Holocaust or whatever, they're evil. There's no like um, I don't know, relationality. There's an in-itself there for sure. There is no like squirm room at all. Uh, and so like, yeah, would it be cool to get back a substantial evil just in the sense of like being able to say things are evil and call things evil uh in an absolute sense? Uh absolute here meaning non-relational, substantial sense. Um, would we be getting something back there? Would would we be getting something back, you know, in our in our way of talking, our way of understanding, uh, if we were to say that, like, no, uh, you know, the trans uh position um is uh substantial in some way, it's a kind of in itself. Um I'm I'm more on the side oftentimes of like, well, because this is my this is my situation where I say I'm masculine, my feminine side withdraws from that sort of a thing. So I'm still in the binary opposition bit. Um and I acknowledge that I have many feminine qualities, um, and that, you know, but like um, you know, my masculine side predominates, but not entirely, because I like wear fancy pants and like I, you know, like have I like mixing uh as I've seen many trans people like to do. Uh not all, but many, like they like not passing. They like to have this mixture where it's like, um, and that's what I like too. I like I like to be like confusing, I enjoy it to myself as well. I like that mixture, I like uh that in-between, I like that sense of flow, of transition, of trans as transitioning, and it's like, but like I never like the sense of trans as in arriving somewhere. Uh so like um, you know, this is but I want to acknowledge that there really are people that are just like, you know, women, I guess, or just men or whatever. And even if they were, you know, identified in such a way that aligned with that, maybe there are dudes, uh, I just assumed it wasn't true, that, you know, really are just men. They have no feminine side or whatever. Uh, and they're essentially men. Uh, there is no failure in their masculinity. Um, that's where the cadene is a total shimmer. Um there is no, like, uh, you know, real man. That's just an imaginary projection. Uh, but maybe there is. Maybe, you know, there's some really interesting position in which you could say that um a person who was assigned masculine at birth but was like um actually feminine is somehow um feminine in uh some essential way that um you know it's a problem. So we're I'll just I'll just wonder if uh because uh I obviously aren't just right. Anyway, uh thanks for joining me.