Just a couple of quotes and points before I leave this particular immersion, Zizek’s The Indivisible Remainder, and move on to the next:
“One more thing should be noted about the blind rotary motion of God prior to the Word: this motion is not yet temporal, it does not occur ‘in time’, since time already presupposes that God has broken free from the closed psychotic circle.”
Now first I would admit that this will seem a little self indulgent in that what I’m mainly noting here is an overlap between my process and that of Zizek’s. It’s a little like saying, “See? I told you so,” when, in fact, all I may be doing is reading myself into it. In my defense, though, I have come to believe that philosophy, or the backbone of one’s philosophical process, is the act of engaging creatively with the world, of thinking what one thinks, and playing it against the writings of those who have gotten further in that process. Beyond that, there is only the check and balance of Alexander Pope’s dictum in A Little Learning:
“A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”
In other words, given the process of self flattery by which we come to know a philosopher, all we can really do is keep playing our perspective against theirs, be open minded, and hope that doing so expands our own processes out a little more.
That said (a reminder in case you got distracted:
“One more thing should be noted about the blind rotary motion of God prior to the Word: this motion is not yet temporal, it does not occur ‘in time’, since time already presupposes that God has broken free from the closed psychotic circle.”
What I’m mainly focusing on here is the phrase ‘closed psychotic circle’ and the preceding ‘blind rotary motion of God prior to the Word’. The overlap I’m mainly seeing is with my concept of the psychotic response to the nihilistic perspective (in which all assumptions float on thin air (in relation to the symbolic order. In it, I see the psychotic response, similar to Schelling’s God ‘prior to the word’, having no real criteria by which to judge action, receding into its own semiotic bubble with its own semiotic rules (its own language games (that alienates it from the general symbolic order.
I would also like to cover something that has seemed implicit throughout my 15 hours with this book: Zizek’s understanding of Lacan’s Jouissance. This was somewhat confirmed by the fact that this book was published in 1996 while Plague of Fantasies (the book I got my sense of Zizek’s sense (via Lacan (of Jouissance (was published in 1997.
“What we have here is Schelling’s grandiose ‘Wagerian’ vision of God in the state of endless ‘pleasure in pain’, agonizing and struggling with Himself, affected by an unbearable anxiety, the vision of ‘psychotic’ mad God who is absolutely alone, a One who is ‘all’ since he tolerates nothing outside Himself -a ‘wild madness, tearing itself apart’.”
And I would also note that both quotes were extracted from the chapter: Schelling in-itself: The ‘Orgasm of Forces’. What has been implicit to me throughout this immersion is the push/pull tension (the jouissance surveyed in Plague of Fantasies (that can be attributed to the tension between expansion (which wants to be something (and contraction which wants to return to the nothingness it was before it became something.