Horner's Corner

A Revolution ne s’autorise que d’elle même

by on Dec.18, 2009, under philosophy, politics


Slavoj Zizek

III. Why Hegelian Dialectics Is Not a Vulgar Evolutionism

Which, then, is the dimension of the law that the law cannot admit publicly? The best way to discern it is through a logical paradox deployed by Jean-Pierre Dupuy in his admirable text on Hitchcock’s Vertigo:

An object possesses a property x until the time t; after t, it is not only that the object no longer has the property x; it is that it is not true that it possessed x at any time. The truth-value of the proposition “the object O has the property x at the moment t’ therefore depends on the moment when this proposition is enunciated.” [1]

hegel-young

Hegel

One should note here the precise formulation: it is not that the truth-value of the proposition “the object O has the property x” depends on the time to which this proposition refers – even when this time is specified, the truth-value depends on the time when the proposition itself is enounced. Or, to quote the title of Dupuy’s text, ”when I’ll die, nothing of our love will ever have existed.” Think about marriage and divorce: the most intelligent argument for the right to divorce (proposed, among others, by none other than the young Marx) does not refer to common vulgarities in the style of “like all things, love attachments are also not eternal, they change in the course of time,” etc.; it rather concedes that indissolvability is in the very notion of marriage. The conclusion is that divorce always has a retroactive scope: it does not only mean that marriage is now annulled, but something much more radical – a marriage should be annulled because it never was a true marriage. And the same holds for Soviet Communism: it is clearly insufficient to say that, in the years of Brezhnev “stagnation,” it “exhausted its potentials, no longer fitting new times”; what its miserable end demonstrates is that it was a historical deadlock from its very beginning.

More

marianne_france_detail

Be Sociable, Share!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

:, , ,

Leave a Reply

Looking for something?

Use the form below to search the site:

Still not finding what you're looking for? Drop a comment on a post or contact us so we can take care of it!

Visit our friends!

A few highly recommended friends...

SEO Booster Lite