Challenges of Patriarchy for Emancipatory Politics
Reflecting on my conversations with writer/philosopher Daniel Tutt
This month in The Portal we will focus on the concept of Jouissance, and will be hosting theologian Barry Taylor, philosopher
, and mentor Pamela von Sabljar, to find out more, or to join: The Portal.Philosophy Portal’s next course starts May 18th and will focus on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right which opens the question of freedom on the level of politics. To find out more, or to join: Philosophy of Right.
This article is in part inspired by my second conversation with Dr. Daniel Tutt on his book Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family, which you can find below:
The “short” 20th century — as categorised by Marxist British historian Eric Hobsbawm — from 1914 and the outbreak of World War I, to 1991 and the end of the Cold War, represented an extreme and universal geopolitical tension between free-market capitalism and state communism.1 Interestingly, Hobsbawm opens the Preface of his classic work, The Age of Extremes, in neither a “Smithian” or a “Marxist” tone, but rather a Hegelian one. While proclaiming that “it is now possible to see the “Short Twentieth Century” in “some historical perspective”,2 he also admits his own historical limitation, in that the work necessarily rests on the “uneven foundations” that he himself (Hobsbawm) was a “participant observer” of the century. Consequently, in the Preface we find an “Owl of Minerva” type of reflection in the title “The Century: A Bird’s Eye View”:3
“We are a part of this century. It is a part of us.”
What we can now say, retroactively, is that Hobsbawm’s ambitious work of sociopolitical historiography offers us a tremendous challenge insofar as we may now ask ourselves: did the Cold War and the Soviet era really end, or was it just momentarily interrupted by a brief intermission in the form of a neoliberal abstract universality?
I bring this question to the forefront because it is increasingly obvious — especially in light of recent global geopolitical tensions — that the neoliberal consensus on the politics of individualistic capitalism and personal responsibility, as well as its supporting “free market” myth, is breaking. We might emphasise that this is particularly obvious when we situate the myth in the context of the drive of global techno-feudal style platforms,4 which absolutely privatise our shared common space,5 making it difficult to actualise rights on the level of family, community, and the state itself.6
Now alternative models of organisation produce tensions that are impossible to ignore — from Russian imperialist expansionism supported by theopolitical mythologies, to Chinese centralised state controlled capital, as well as potential reactionary social crises throughout Europe centred around questions of immigration and self-identity — is forcing us to consider that the 21st century may be an age of multipolarity or “plural sphereology”, as suggested by philosopher Peter Sloterdijk:7
“So the One Orb has imploded—now the foams are alive."
Such a notion of multipolarity, grounding particular reactionary movements against the abstract universality of neoliberalism, is also the emphasis and motivation behind the political theories of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin’s “plurality of civilisational spaces”.8
The tensions implicit in such a shift suggest that our shared space of abstract universality no longer meaningfully supports or connects to the concrete particular lifeworlds of human beings. In other words, our concrete particular lifeworlds are becoming increasingly uninhabitable in the face of the reigning abstract universality (or what is often referred to as a “global monoculture”).9 Thus, if we are to really think through this tension, and potentially derive a new sense of universality, we should start with the basic element required to ground a particular life world: the family (and work up from there: to community, state, relations between states, and beyond).10
That is why, in my most recent discussion with writer/philosopher and social political theorist Daniel Tutt, we continue our discussion on the psychoanalysis of the family, inspired by his book of the same name.11 For Tutt, the family has been overlooked by emancipatory political projects on the level of universality, and thus for rethinking the foundation of neoliberal capitalist society. When we think about the particularist reactions to neoliberal capitalist society, inspired as they are by visions of a plurality of civilisational spaces, and a return to local traditionalism in the face of “global monoculture”, much of this movement is inspired and motivated by reclaiming the perceived loss of the family and our extended familial networks, in the face of an individualist culture.
Tutt opens our most recent discussion with the personal admission that his original attraction to Marxist and socialist politics was precisely as a reaction to the neoliberal abstract universal slogan par excellence: There Is No Alternative (TINA). Perhaps that is why, throughout his work Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family, there is such a consistent focus on open social experimentation, in trying to forge a forward direction grounding the conditions of possibility for an emancipatory politics. This social experimentation is not only grounded in Marxist and socialist theory, but as one would expect given the title of the book, complimented with work in the Freudo-Lacanian tradition. Here he attempts to think his political work in the context of the deepest problems for the subject of the unconscious.12 What this opens for Tutt is a Freudo-Marxist “bridge”13 for an emancipatory politics that can think the family as a revolutionary entity. Tutt even goes so far as to reinvent Aristotle’s old axiom:14
“Man is an animal that is more familial than political.”
He frames the family as a revolutionary political entity against the 1960s countercultural slogan which centres the “revolution of everyday life”. Tutt claims that this idea has simultaneously led to the “abolishment of the family” and the “hyper-marketisation of everyday life”.15 In other words, when emancipatory politics abolishes the family (seeing the family as opposed to freedom) — especially in the representative power of the patriarchal family as general normativity, claiming that it is as a repressive entity — we do not get liberation. We rather get a form of psychosis that paradoxically lends itself to exactly what philosopher Gilles Deleuze was so concerned about: captured; captured by the hyper-marketisation of everyday life.16 Without any meaningful role for the paternal function, the Oedipus complex as a right of passage allowing the child to individuate in its separation from the mother, breaks down, and we lose the capacity to ground symbolic mediation that could give us some safe distance from the alienation of market effects. Tutt refers to this as a “crisis of initiation”.17
To be specific, when progressives universalise an emancipatory political project which specifically sidelines the patriarchal family as a “sunk agency”, and claims that post-patriarchal communes can replace the family, we obfuscate the importance of what we have learned in psychoanalysis, about the challenges and paradoxes of the paternal function, and its mediation.18 Consequently, would it be possible to connect a “New Left” to the family as central to emancipation? This would not necessarily have to be reifying a nuclear heterosexual mode of organisation, but it would also be in no ways antagonistic to such a mode of organisation. For Tutt, where we might start is thinking a radical concept of the family constructed from one idea that stretches back to the 19th century: a family that centres leisure time;19 and another idea inspired by the work of historical and social critic Christopher Lasch: the family as a haven in a heartless world.20
In this way of thinking, for Tutt, the family can function as a vessel that can help us subtract from the market economy, and the way its incentives and pressures can lead to the instrumentalisation of family life. This is evidenced, unfortunately, in one of the strongest symptoms of liberal capitalism, since the 2008 financial crisis, that people have increasingly stopped experimenting with family and marriage. In this precise context, can we view the emergence of a left that focuses on the revolution of culture (multiplicity of sex, gender, racial identity expression) over the revolution of class politics, as the location where we need to fight for the re-centring of the family as a revolutionary entity?21 If we are to re-centre the family as a revolutionary entity, we need to find a way to discuss the nature and the function of the father. Tutt defines the father qua “paternal function” (independent of man/woman, male/female), and by extension the social nature of patriarchy, in the following way:22
“Patriarchy is a constant dialectical confrontation with the dance of overcoming relations of dependence.”
In this context, the paternal function and the social nature of patriarchy, may be essential for helping us avoid dependence on market capture. Throughout my discussions with Tutt, he affirms the paradox that, while it is true that capitalism has historically eroded patriarchy and the paternal function from its original agricultural foundations (opening a general “decline of the paternal function” in the traditional context of its notion); the working class in general still wants to reproduce the family in capitalism, even if the material conditions of capitalism make it increasingly difficult. What we find here is an affective tension that is increasingly difficult to discuss outside of the frameworks of religious traditionalism. The modern father, or even the father in capitalism in general, has become the humiliated father, the absent father, the fragmented and broken father.23 In such undignified conditions, who would in their right mind want to become a father?
Well, as we may find out, the question of becoming a father, or more accurately, embodying the paternal function, might not be one of desire, but drive, in the lifting of desire out of its infantile matrix of dependence and into the context of independent free spirit. It is on this level that we may try to model conversations where the importance of the role of the paternal function is synergistic with emancipatory politics, as opposed to becoming repressed and foreclosed. As I will elaborate below, if we do not take up the question of the paternal function in general, abstracted from its traditional confines, we will constantly be dealing with the problem in a weird “return of the repressed”, and especially in our current context, online. Indeed, Tutt points out that if we continue to repress and foreclose the nature and issue of the paternal function, people will seek surrogate father replacements outside of the family as well as our institutions, that is, online. From Tutt:24
“Online groups need to be contextualised as a response to the collapse at the level of [family and institution].”
Here we might entertain the idea that it is not possible to deconstruct the father qua paternal function, but rather must think about it as an indestructible dimension of our being-in-language. I would suggest that, in many ways, our current culture wars are being driven by young men who are not only seeking virtual replacements for the humiliated, absent, fragmented, or broken father, but also cannot find it in contemporary institutional context. Thus, there is a lot of unprocessed aggression that is stunting our capacity to cultivate a new generation of independence.
Let us first discuss the nature of these social and cultural symptoms in the context of what psychoanalysis has learned about the nature of the paternal function in its positive and negative dimensions. For psychoanalysis, the positive side of the paternal function, is that it is crucial for the formation of social communities however, the negative side, is that when it comes to the formation of social communities, we always have to deal with the potential problem of creating them around a mythological Father of the Horde. The Father of the Horde is the embodied representative of the mythic Ur-Father, or the the All-powerful Father of our primal Oedipal fantasies. Mythologically speaking, the Ur-Father is the father who possesses the ultimate enjoyment, absolutely: he has sexual access to all the women, he is a killing machine who can destroy any opponent, he has the skill to develop and cultivate an abundance of resources; and most importantly for the development of the myth, he does not share this enjoyment with his brothers and sons, but keeps it all to himself.
Here we find the real core of the Freudian unconscious: incestuous sexuality (sexual access to all of the women); killing drive (killing machine who can destroy any opponent); cannibalism (cultivated abundance of resources) expressed in one monstrous and singular entity. Of course, this entity has never existed, but crucially for psychoanalysis, that does not matter, since the fantasy both persists and insists with real effects and consequences.25 Moreover, it may be structurally indestructible, in the sense that the human starting condition is one of pure impotence, well noted by Lacan:26
“[Man’s] relationship to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the very heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of malaise and motor uncoordination of the neonatal months.”
And yet and still, in this condition we find ourselves surrounded by figures who, by comparison, appear omnipotent, as they can do everything that seems impossible for us to do. As already mentioned in reference to Tutt’s definition of the paternal function, it is in this “eternal wrestling” with this condition of dependence, towards the condition of possibility for our independence, which refreshes itself with every newborn human being, that the role of the paternal function should be precisely situated.
What is most important to understand in the context of this article, is that the emergence of a social order constructed around a mythical ur-father, is a symptom of chaos within our social order. When we are in a chaotic social situation, we are dramatically re-acquainted with our primal impotence in the present, everything is a mess, and we are totally at a lack to put it straight. Here ur-father figures emerge and reproduce pathological patterns of identification, in many ways exploiting physical or virtual transference dynamics. These figures use the objectivity of the chaos in order to institute the mirage of an absolute order, the image of an “all-powerful one” that can offer strict transcendental assurance and guarantees, even if it comes at the cost of an absurd power asymmetry in the reification of a God-like figure. Today, we are seeing this happening, not only in national political figures like Putin, Jinping, or Trump, but also in our popular media and culture around figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.27
The problem with identification with these figures is that such authority, from a psychoanalytic point of view, maintains aggressivity towards the father and does not facilitate the development of rational independent thought, specifically in the aforementioned context of the transition and maturation from impotent dependence to potent independence. Rather, what happens is that men form gangs and associations outside of the context of the family and institutions, and risk remaining in a state of permanent adolescence, unable to transcend their primal aggression, which maintains itself in a fantasmatic violent simulation (with real effects and consequences).
No wonder there are many figures in Peterson’s and Tate’s orbit who are not calling for a universal sublation of enlightenment liberalism for a higher order of secular political socialism, but rather calling for particular traditionalist regression to pre-modern and pre-enlightenment forms of government, society, and culture (even theocracy). Indeed, it would be my claim, that there is a mega-important difference between the universal sublation of enlightenment liberalism, and particular regression to pre-enlightenment ill-liberalism, which I suspect would further reify techno-feudal dynamics with a “beautiful traditionalist aesthetic cover”. This difference is a difference between a population of young men that maintain their aggression towards ur-fathers (fathers to the horde), and a population of young men that are capable of transcending their aggression towards the father, and becoming capable of embodying the paternal function in their freedom and autonomy. Getting this dynamic right is thus critical for the move from scene (which can lead to regressive group dynamics) to milieu (which could be seen as the sublation of liberalism).28
In order to understand this on a deeper level we have to invoke the theory of Jacques Lacan around the idea of the Name-of-the-Father. For Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father is a paternal metaphor closely related to the capacity for the social mediation of signification and thinking. If a subject is unable to develop a relationship to the paternal metaphor, it falls into clinical structures most closely related to psychotic foreclosure and perverted disavowal.29 Indeed, for Lacan, in order to maintain our secular atheist liberal culture, future psychoanalytic philosophers would need to study The Bible in order to see how Western Christian culture first established the paternal function in relation to the Name-of-the-Father.30 Such a project can only be seen as synergistic to philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s notion of Christian Atheism, and especially his claim that the contemporary West has entered a self-destructive death spiral, losing its capacity to assert its own self-identity.31
Lacan states explicitly that the stakes for the institution of the Name-of-the-Father take place at the level of the subject’s aggressivity, and importantly for the context of politics of the family, at the level of the subject’s aggressivity towards the father in its capacity to move towards transcendence of its dependence on the mother:32
“Freud reveals to us that it is thanks to the Name-of-the-Father that man does not remain bound to the sexual service of his mother, that aggression towards the Father is at the very heart of the Law, and that the Law is at the service of the desire that Law institutes through the prohibition of incest.”
What is important in our current situation, is that we interpret this Name-of-the-Father, not only as an empirical biological father, but as both an intergenerational memory for the construction of real social networks capable of reproducing themselves (on the level of son-father-grandfather), as well as in bonds of students and teachers in the process of intellectual and social maturation. Tutt noted to me that, in the context of patriarchy as an on-going dialectical tension with infantile dependence, we should be aware that when the intergenerational memory of the son-father-grandfather is broken, this is precisely the location where people start inventing fantasmatic and mythological relations to God or gods; and that when you are a teacher, it is just a brutal fact that students will form attachments with you that are basically metaphorical father substitutes.
What we must do as a consequence — in contrast to the temptation within emancipatory political projects to a transcendence of the paternal function for the commune — is include the fact that in any given community, there will be sites of paternal identification that require the overcoming of something subjective on the level of the father of the law and dependence on the mother. Without including this dimension, the commune itself becomes a regressive notion, leading to social conditions where unprocessed aggressivity maintains itself in relation to virtual-fantasmatic ur-fathers, and a dependence on mother-figures. Is not the current Western culture war, between populist right-wing reactionaries and woke liberal politically correct culture, reproducing precisely this Oedipal drama? In this context, everything hinges on getting right the nature of the paternal function in processes of subjectivisation and individuation.
In my own work I have emphasised that distinction between a philosophy with a focus on deconstruction (say, of the paternal function), and a philosophy with a focus on indestructibility (say, of the paternal function). What we get when we focus on deconstructive philosophy of the paternal function, is the idea that we can simply do community without the phallus, that is a community that does not recognise lack and sexual difference and mediation of jouissance: a post-phallogocentric culture and society. However, when we focus on an indestructible philosophy of the paternal function, we cannot help but confront the mega-problems and the contradictions of the possession of the phallus. Who possesses the phallus? Who doesn't? And what are the political ramifications as it relates to lack and sexual difference, and perhaps most importantly, the mediation of jouissance?
Few things are as difficult to think and talk about as this, perhaps because lack, sexual difference and jouissance rupture the symbolic from within and remind us of the real. And at the same time, as Tutt noted to me, who does and does not possess the nature of the phallus means everything for the resolution of one’s own freedom, which basically means the resolution of the ego-ideal on the level of lack, sexual difference and jouissance. As mentioned above, whenever a human group/community forms, what we find at its origin is some symbolic proposition, embodied in a father-figure (whether male or female), for a resolution to the problem of the phallus as lacking, and thus reproducing sexual difference and issues of the distribution of jouissance. Thus, while it is positive that a group forms due to the appearance, on a primordial level, of an ambiguous affective bond, that is a love/hate to a father, this is at once emancipatory and problematic. It is emancipatory in the sense that the conditions of possibility for the transcendence of dependence have been opened, but problematic in the sense that the tension of mediating freedom and autonomy for those identifying with the group leader has only just begun. Here we find all of the interesting tensions regarding the ethics of desire from a psychoanalytic perspective.
To confront the ethics of desire, we must re-confront the central problem in the mythological tale of the ur-father or the father of the horde, namely, that the brothers and sons of the ur-father end up killing the ur-father/father of the horde. Why? Precisely because he did not share with them his jouissance, but rather kept it all for himself. In other words, the killing of the father for the transcendence of the dependence on the mother, is precisely located in relation to the problem of the maintenance and distribution of jouissance.33 Here the ethical question arises, for both group leaders and followers: what to do ethically with my jouissance? Here consider social theorist
’s framing of the issue which cuts to the the tension between individual/collective on the level of jouissance:34“To what degree is our social life, collectives that we rely on, resting upon our ability to participate in some collective jouissance. Jouissance in this sense is always a question of the economy of power. No political order can be maintained without this excess of enjoyment.”
Anand is pointing that while we depend on collectives for the mediation of our independence, this involves confronting the problematics of economy of power that are to be conceived in terms of enjoyment distribution. How to both establish a law for higher group cohesion and solidarity in the mediation of independence, while recognising the irreducible excess within each individual member of the group and its distribution? If we think about this tension on the level of individualist abstract universality (which is perceived to exhibit excessive jouissance for non-reproductive ends) and collectivist concrete particularities (which are perceived to contain the excess of jouissance for collective biosocial reproduction), we see the zero-level political issues involve the distribution of jouissance between the individual and the collective. This political issue was not as much a political issue before modernity, because necessity forced the question to the side of the maintenance of the collective, at the expense of the individual. But today that is no longer the case.
One of Tutt’s solutions to this issue is the idea that the father figure himself needs to more reflectively develop an inverse relationship to jouissance. In other words, the father figure himself, as the paternal metaphor who embodies the master signifier of lack as non-lacking (independent free spirit), needs to function, not as an eternal site of transcendental identification (some God-like figure), but rather as a figure of a vanishing mediator. In this process, what is helpful internal to the father himself, is to invert the enjoyment of envy from father to son. While the ur-father who horde’s the jouissance is envied by the sons (which is why they kill him), the father who has internalised lack in the non-lacking master signifier, can practice the envy for the son and thus distribute his jouissance to him.
Did not
do precisely this in his interview with me?:35“I will start to write this, Enter the Alien, so it is good that we did this publicly, because if I look deep into my evil, you know what is the real proof that I appreciate you, it is a dirty paradox, I envy you, I hate you, and my dream is how could I have not seen this myself?”
In other words, what Žižek is playing with is the inversion of jouissance from father to son in envying my work. This not necessarily needed on my end — as I have already played out my aggression of an intellectual father figure and overcoming dependence on the mother, in previous sociohistorical circumstances — but it is nevertheless appreciated, and a good general practice to model (and which he does in general model). And indeed, it is important to emphasise that Žižek would not be capable of embodying this inversion of jouissance, if I had consciously or unconsciously “gone to war” with him. The mistake that so many younger men make when they admire an older man, is think that the only way to get the father to recognise them, is by going to war with him. Such energy needs to be transcended, in order for the collective jouissance to become distributed.
Independent of Žižek, in building Philosophy Portal, my long-term goals do involve establishing metaphorical relationships with both older paternal figures, who are able to recognise me as an intellectual “son”; as well as play my part as a lacking “father” who can recognise, and be envious of, the younger men who I can see are really doing the work to invent new pathways for jouissance while also not going to war with me. This is the level at which I conceive of the ethics of desire and collective jouissance. Without this dimension, I think the future of real emancipatory politics is lost. Let us call it the reflective re-distribution of collective jouissance in taking on the challenge of the ethics of desire inclusive of the paternal function (as opposed to its foreclosure or disavowal).36 My working hypothesis here is that, not only is the rise of religious identification about the “crisis of initiation” in mediating such inversions of jouissance, but also potentially ways of obfuscating one’s direct involvement in actual relationships with this process, i.e. like the actual older men whom you are trying to establish collaborative bonds, or the actual younger men who are trying to establish collaborative bonds with you. In my view, to really mediate this process, one should stay with working the drive inherent to these tensions, as opposed to clinging to the mythological identities of religion in order to represent the fact that you (or more precisely, your symptom) is aware of this problem.
This ultimately brings us to the most important level of overcoming that marks the site of the paternal function. What is being achieved at the site of the paternal function is the opening and conditions of possibility for both the overcoming of dependence on the mother and the achievement of an equality with the father. The ethics of desire must be specifically situated in relation to both functions.37 The men, whether physical or online, who strive to maintain some sort of position of permanent transcendental identification are doomed to be killed by their followers, or be forever so far above their followers that they can never really develop a mutual respect. In contrast, the men who occupy the paternal function as a vanishing mediator, may both help others overcome their dependence on the mother and overtime develop relations of equal recognition. However, it must be emphasised that this equal recognition does not necessarily mean — in fact cannot mean — a complete equity (in terms of skill, intelligence, capacity, age, status, rank, etc.), but rather an equality in freedom and autonomy, of the capacity for embodying thinking and signification as such (where we find irreducible differences, tensions, and so forth).
Moreover, the cultivation of real embodied thinking and signification as such, is more needed than ever, as we are heading into strange geopolitical times. Hobsbawm recognised from his limited historical vantage point, or “bird’s eye view”, the “Short Twentieth Century” as structured by the tension between capitalism and communism. We inhabitants of the 21st century now seem to be approaching the end of a certain abstract universal neoliberalism, which has been in place since this end. Here not only questions of Marxism, socialism, communism, and so forth, are re-surfacing, but also traditional religious fundamentalisms, are re-surfacing, both in relation to what is perceived to be the evils of neoliberal capitalist individualism. Here questions of the commune as alternatives to the family are re-surfacing in what is perceived to be the evils of repressive patriarchal structures; but also questions of re-centring the patriarchal family structure under a theopolitical community are re-surfacing in what is perceived to be the evils of a global monoculture that destroys the capacities for familial life.38
To make matters more complex, all of these dynamics are being mirrored through the global digital screen in our increasingly online lives.
I think that the stakes of my discussions with Daniel Tutt make clear, that to really think again emancipatory politics today, we must take a good hard look at the paternal function, as well as the family form itself as potentially revolutionary, in order to build out the future of a project that truly has freedom at its heart. In order to do that, we need to take seriously the way in which the paternal function helps us mediate the tensions of collectivist and individualist jouissance, but also calls forth the need for inversion of jouissance on the part of the paternal figure, in order to attempt a new re-binding of the generations. However, as already mentioned, and also as mentioned by Tutt in our conversation, this inversion of Jouissance on the part of paternal figures, is only possible if the “son” does not go to “war” with the father. Both sides play a role here. The difference between a society that regresses to transcendental reifications of particularist ur-fathers via unprocessed aggressivity, and a society that sublates such reifications for the mystery of freedom in universal thought and speech, seems to be at stake here.
Surprisingly, in the same way that Hobsbawn, a Marxist historian, started his classic work The Age of Extremes with reference to a Hegelian “Owl of Minerva” point of view, perhaps we too need to go back to the political drawing board with the help of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel makes clear that we are not only thinking about civil rights, but rights on the level of family, community, state, and the interrelations between states. Without thinking on this level, from the ground up, the form of absolute freedom that expresses itself in the interrelation between states qua multipolar/plurality of civilisational spaces, may just become brutal warfare of differences, as opposed to a rational mediation.
This month in The Portal we will focus on the concept of Jouissance, and will be hosting theologian Barry Taylor, philosopher
, and mentor Pamela von Sabljar, to find out more, or to join: The Portal.Philosophy Portal’s next course starts May 18th and will focus on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right which opens the question of freedom on the level of politics. To find out more, or to join: Philosophy of Right.
Hobsbawm, E. 1994. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. Hachette UK.
Ibid. Preface and Acknowledgements.
Ibid. The Century: A Bird’s Eye View.
Varoufakis, Y. 2024. Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. Melville House.
See: Last, C. 2020. Global Commons in the Global Brain. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 107-147.
Which is in part why Philosophy Portal will be focusing on teaching Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, see: Philosophy of Right.
Sloterdijk, P. 2016. Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology. MIT Press.
Millerman, M. 2023. Alexander Dugin Explained. First Things. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/02/alexander-dugin-explained (accessed: April 15 2024)
See: Collins, S. & Collins, M. 2023. The Pragmatists Guide to Crafting Religion. Omniscion Press.
As Hegel states in the Philosophy of Right, “man has by nature the impulse to right, the impulse to property, the morality, to sexual love, and to social life” and if our current forms of political universality leave this out of the equation when deriving the relations between states, we will inevitably encounter particularist reactions to it, see: Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 41.
Tutt, D. 2022. Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: the Crisis of Initiation. Palgrave Macmillan.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. x.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. xxii.
Here we need to think the difference between a “cheap” and a “costly” Deleuze on the level of representation and familial life; while Deleuze is concerned with the way we can become captured by representations of social normativity (or givens), and that this may threaten individual creative expression (or release), we must also recognise these two dimensions in a constant and contradictory dialectical tension. Without recognising this “cost” we risk falling into an isolated individualistic society that is hyper-creative, but unable to socially mediate itself. For more thinking in this direction, see
: Rose, O.G. 2024. Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose.Tutt, D. 2022. Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: the Crisis of Initiation. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 53.
Tutt himself does not seem to reify the patriarchal family or the commune, but rather challenges us to think of an experiment between the two that is grounded inclusive of insights about Jacques Lacan’s notion of the Name-of-the-Father, see: Tutt, D. 2022. Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: the Crisis of Initiation. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 128.
A point also centred by priest and theologian Ivan Illich, see: Illich, I, 1971. Deschooling Society.
Lasch, C. 1995. Haven in a Heartless World: The family besieged. W.W. Norton & Company.
In my first conversation with Tutt, many of these issues were discussed: Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family.
DECLINE OF THE PATERNAL FUNCTION (PSYCHOANALYSIS AND POLITICS OF THE FAMILY PT. 2) (w/ Daniel Tutt). Philosophy Portal. (link)
Tutt, D. 2022. Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: the Crisis of Initiation. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 54.
DECLINE OF THE PATERNAL FUNCTION (PSYCHOANALYSIS AND POLITICS OF THE FAMILY PT. 2) (w/ Daniel Tutt). Philosophy Portal. (link)
In my discussion “Reading Lacan’s Écrits 2” with Lacanian psychoanalyst
of , he referred to this phenomenon as the “uncut daddy dick”, see: Reading Lacan’s Écrits 2.Lacan, J. 2005. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 78.
Note here how well this archetype is reproduced in a figure like Jordan Peterson, whose best-selling book literally embodies this archetypes in the title: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, see: Peterson, J. 2018. 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Random House Canada.
The distinction scene to milieu has been developed by David McKerracher of
at the Logic for the Global Brain conference, as well as in the upcoming anthology, see: McKerracher, D. 2024. Scene to Milieu. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books.Lacan, J. 2005. Science and Truth. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 742.
Ibid. (Lacan states explicitly that he wanted to conduct this research, and that he was “inconsolable” at “having had to drop” the project.)
Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How To Be A Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic., see also: Atheism as the Truth of Christianity.
Lacan, J. 2005. On Freud’s “Trieb” and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 723.
Ibid. p. 336.
However, there is a complex ethics here. In the aforementioned example of Žižek’s work of redistributing collective jouissance, this was only made possible because of two parties committed to self-relating negativity, i.e. Žižek was able to look into his deepest evil, and I was able to over many years recognise Žižek as my intellectual inspiration without trying to overcome or kill him. Both sides are needed. In my creation of Philosophy Portal I have already perceived “crises of jouissance” where younger men who were unable to handle the negativity of jouissance, basically start a different intellectual pathway as nothing but a reaction to my work. On the other hand, there are younger men who can handle the negativity of jouissance, and simultaneously start to invent new pathways for jouissance, while recognising me as an intellectual inspiration.
As noted by
in the livestream of the conversation with Daniel Tutt, Christ achieves this equality with the father through crucifixion. Here I can again take the opportunity to express my view that, while the myth of the crucifixion is an important cultural representation, one should stay in thinking with one’s own drive, and the crucifixion it involves in one’s concrete relations, over a type of pathological over-identification with Christ. In short, stay with the real of truth in the negativity of the drive, and Christ will follow; if one rather clings to the image of Christ to obfuscate the negativity of the drive, Christ may, paradoxically, be very far away.See again: Collins, S. & Collins, M. 2023. The Pragmatists Guide to Crafting Religion. Omniscion Press.
Brimming with genius, and I'm extremely taken by how you described Žižek and "the work to invent new pathways for jouissance while also not going to war." That's a fruitful angle to explore that I've taken down copious notes to reflect on. Well done, Cadell, impressive as always!