The Real, knowledge of death and sexuality

If only for the joy of my sadness,

I wish there were no death on this earth.

E. M. Cioran

Lacan’s mistake about life is not minor, is a mistake in the base of any possible thinking. What is life? From the understanding of that question has to start any thinking that wants to work with reality. Reality is, after all, the order of the living Beings. Here is also where Badiou and Žižek are lost in Europe. In the function of the written, from Encore, Lacan says:

We must still indicate what this link means. The link -we can but turn to this right away- is a link between those who speak. You can immediately see where we are headed -its not just anyone who speaks, of course; it’s beings, beings we are used to qualifying as “living,” and it would, perhaps, be rather difficult to exclude the dimension of life from those who speak. But we immediately realize that this dimension simultaneously brings in that of death, and that a radical signifying ambiguity results from this. The sole function on the basis of which life can me defined, namely, the reproduction of a body, can itself be characterized neither by life nor by death, since reproduction as such, insofar as it is sexual, involves both life and death.

The italics are mine, and I used them to separate the right and the wrong insight of the paragraph. The first part is the one that Badiou and Žižek miss all the time. The second part is a big mistake which in any way holds the slightest analysis. Maybe is the support of the second part of the text over the first one what makes Badiou turns to mathematics for an ontology. The only function on the base of which life can be defined is the infinite self-determination of what a word is for me and the boundary that separates me, gaps me, from that world. Reproduction, and I would include death, are not related in any fundamental way to Beings that we refer as living. One could say that here, Lacan is not talking about Beings in general but speaking beings. It doesn’t matter. The continuity of life implies that we are first living Beings, and after that, in spite that the after here is not used on the temporal sense of the term, we are speaking Beings. This is for me the meaning of “only life can know life,” it is the fidelity of living being to the life event, our curse and gift. We could once more recall Parra and paraphrase his Siegmound Freud, and think of a poem entitled Jaques Lacan (the missing of the letter is not casual, remembers us what Lacan’s thought Lacks) where the psychoanalyst relates everything with reproduction, death, and differences. At the end of the poem, “Europe is a loop that starts and ends in a writer, the loop is about to close in itself.”

There is no sexual relation. So what? We are alive. We live.

In a certain way, Parra was right of accusing Einstein of dogmatism and Freud of relating everything to the sexual act, to death. We must give a small step. A jump to life, to south America, to scientific discourse, even if these three terms seem impossible to combine in a single idea. It is not a coincidence that life was defined in scientific discourse in Chile, in the 70’s. There where nothing was going on, life cut a deal with reason, with science. It is not a casual neither that Badiou always skip Chile in his talk about the revolutions in Latin America.

So, Varela. The operational closure of living beings, we should say instead, at least, that is what I take from Varela. But we can take a bit more than that and listen himself talking about the idea of autopoiesis twenty years later of the invention of it (the italics are his):

What does that an idea like autopoiesis, strictly a theory of cellular organization, acquires visibility and prominence beyond professional biology and makes it able to affect different fields of knowledge? My answer is that in the last term we can only understand this phenomena because the idea has an important background of historical sensitivities with which it aligns and resonate. This background of tendencies doesn’t appear but in retrospective, becuse ideas, like history, are a possibility that is cultivated, and not a mechanical determinism. From this distance, autopoiesis has a privileged position since it says in an explicit and clear way, a tendency that today is already a force configuration in a many different domains of cultural life.

The tendency I recall, said in few words, is the disappearing of the social and intellectual space which make of knowing a mental representation, and of man a rational agent. It is the disappearing of what Heidegger calls the epoch of the image of the world, and that can also be designated as cartesianism. If autopoiesis has had influence is because it knew how to align with another project, which center of interest is the interpretative capacity of the living being that conceives man not as an agent that “discovers” the world, but one who constitutes it. It is what we could call the ontological turn of modernity.

A bit later, he will say that ideas appear as a movement of the historical networks in which individuals are formed, and in a not so humble neither disproportional exemplification, he will talk about how Darwin had Wallace, Einstein had Lorentz, and Crick had Rose and Pauling when he found Watson. So autopoiesis had his antecedents and cannot be separated from the Chile of the 60’s and 70’s: “It was Chile, as a whole, the one that played a fundamental role in this story.”

How to understand this? In the Tractatus (4.27) Wittgenstein talks about the “existence of n atomic facts.” What Europe cannot think yet, is that there are an innumerable number of atomic facts. Said in other words, anything can happen, life can happen. The kind of infinite that is born with life is the infinity of the world itself. Something that no ontology can grasp, or rather, something that metaphysics can grasp only insofar being the first chapter of fantastic literature. What does this mean? “Things became duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.” Bolaño was right, Latin American literature is not Borges. Talking about Bolaño, I just grabbed El gaucho insufrible and I found myself with a story that Parra used to say, Bolaño tells us. Not so long ago, he got a PhD honoris causa, by the Univeristy of Concepcion. Concepcion is, or was until the earthquake of 2010, the second biggest city in Chile, and it is loceted somewhere north of Chillan, the town of the young Parra. Concepcion in Spanish means conception by the way. So, Parra gets his PhD and is asked to give a lecture, and the first thing that Parra explains, is that when he was a child or teenager, he used to come to this university, not for studying but to sell sandwiches that the students would eat between lessons. There, Parra, the biggest poet of Latin America remembered himself, poor, barely dressed with poor clothes, and how he got caught “as a butterfly before the question that Wittgenstein set to us, from another time and from the far away Europe, and that doesn’t have an answer: this hand is a hand or it isn’t?” In the next paragraph Bolaño will add: “Latinamerica is the madhouse of Europe like United States was its factory. The factory is now in the hands of the foremen and run away mad men are its workforce. The madhouse, since more than seventy years, it’s burning in its own oil, in its own fat.” Do you get what I mean, Europe? That is the real that Parra inhabits, that Borges inhabits, that Bolaño inhabits, and which intersection with Badiou’s and Lacan’s and Wittgenstein’s naturals is the empty set. The empty set is the one that founds the numbers, we must to start the counting from there.

Maybe I went to far away. In the rest of the chapter [this is an excerpt from the book] I will constrain myself to simply point out where you can find Europeaness in Badiou and Žižek. First a small quote from Badiou: “Everything depends on the consequences. But we need to remark: there are no transcendental consequences stronger than make appear in a world something that didn't exist there.” Yes, there are: The appearance of the something and the world at the same time, in the same movement, as life does. Can we use the same logic? That is, can we create in the same movement the subject of a process and the world where that process will exist? I think we can. This is the Commune of Paris. Not just the workers came into existence that day, but a new world that we inhabit today, and that is impossible for us to subtract from. Regardless of the subject been annihilated in the following two months, the world that they created with their event is a consubstantial part of our world, in the same way that the world that life created when it appeared the first time is part of our world. We are the inhabitants of the worlds created in the innumerable events that have made of the world what it is today. And if we want a world tomorrow, we need to create the possibilities for new events to occur.

The only way to achieve this, it is to allow our acts to have consequences, universal consequences for the world, for the only one world that there is. Capitalism, in his melting of everything that is solid into air, release us from the consequences of our acts and life. In doing this, destroy the possibilities that grant the existence of subjects, and what is more important, the only world. Capitalism is not just world-less in the sense that it doesn’t give any world, but in the sense that it undermines the very possibility of having one. This undermining has its most notorious (and less important) expression in the actual ecological disaster, which is treating the existence of life as we know it in the Earth. But we can live without a planet.

What we cannot afford anymore, is to live without an idea.

Photo by me: a view over the Mediterranean sea in Ajaccio at dusk.