In this reply to Robrecht Vanderbeeken’s essay ‘The Screen as an In-Between’ questions are raised concerning the three distinctive effects the authors attributes to contemporary audiovisual media—eclipsing, interpassivity and truth procedure—and argued that they fail to highlight the specificity of the new media referred to.

Badioujevo zanimanje za Pascala je posledica načina, kako slednji misli skupaj um in vero, namesto da bi ju preprosto zoperstavljal. Um mora ne le spoznati svoje lastne omejitve, ampak tudi pripoznati presežek, ki deluje hkrati kot ovira in kot poriv njegovega delovanja. Badiou je očitno naklonjen pascalovskemu subjektu, ki veruje, ne da bi bila njegova vera zunanja in zoperstavljena umu. A vseeno se zdi, da Badiou spregleda poseben kontekst Pascalove misli in zato ostaja slep za problematičen značaj pascalovskega, s tem (...) pa tudi svojega lastnega militantnega subjekta. Na kratko rečeno: politični militant zase morda misli, da je subjekt postopka resnice, a da bi to naposled tudi postal, se bo moral izogniti vsaj temu, da postane objekt temačnega, okrutnega in nehvaležnega Boga. Tu nam prav Lacanovo branje Pascala omogoči izdelati bolj rafinirano teorijo subjekta, ki je hkrati svarilo pred krščansko, »perverzno« eksploatacijo tega subjekta. Sodoben primer tovrstne eksploatacije je mogoče videti v neoliberalizmu, ki od nas pričakuje, da dejansko ljubimo sistem, ki nam v zameno ne dolguje ničesar. (shrink)

Evoking the contemporary Zeitgeist of looming ecological, political and economic disaster, a distinguished group of thinkers invite a compelling reconsideration of the ways we, as representing subjects, might be more deeply implicated in catastrophic events than we ordinarily imagine"--Provided by publisher.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Above and Beneath Classification”: Bartleby, Life and Times of Michael K, and Syntagmatic ParticipationGert Buelens (bio) and Dominiek Hoens (bio)The history of the relation between the law, norm, or rule on the one hand and what forms an exception to that rule on the other is complex and multifaceted.1 In the most general terms, one could posit that the exception is that which escapes from the rule. Thus, (...) confronted with the strangeness of Michael K, his noncommunicativeness, his odd combination of meekness and intransigence, the medical officer in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K assigns K a place “above and beneath classification” [Coetzee 151]. Michael K is at once too large and too small to fit into the administrative and humanitarian categories that pertain at the prisoner camp. He appears to the medical officer—whose good intentions and patient, selfless interest in K cannot be doubted—as a recalcitrant, nonidentifiable object that flirts with dehumanization. To put it in Bataille’s terms, Michael K is formless (informe), and his existence can, by mere virtue of that fact, be called scandalous.2Let us take a closer look at the expression “above and beneath classification.” We can note that (1) it names something that situates itself on the outside of any classification; (2) this something must have a paradoxical status, since it is at once above and beneath classification; (3) the nonclassifiable is regarded as such from a classifying perspective. Although the latter point may sound tautological, it nonetheless touches upon one of the most difficult dimensions of the exception: if the exception is always an exception to the rule, how can it exist otherwise than by virtue of that rule? how can it be more than just the rule’s negative? But if the exception radically breaks away from the rule, then how is it possible for that rule to identify the exception and recognize it as such? This crucial problem has formed the basis for reflection on the relation between rule and exception. Freud, for instance, saw the exception (crime) as constitutive of social ties and the social order. Lacan needed a special topology to show the extimate character of what is at once inside and outside the symbolic order [Lacan, Miller]. Religious ways of thinking could be said to have located the exception as transcendent to any human order. For Badiou, the secularization of the infinite cannot be thought apart from an immanent, rather than transcendent, event that is disruptive of all order. In Derrida’s subtle analyses, the originary supplement appears as both constitutive and deconstructive. Agamben regards the exception as having become the political rule. These interpretative frameworks, in spite of some deep distinctions, all show not only that the rule cannot do without the exception, but that the exception is just as dependent on the rule. Even when the exception is regarded as a kind of pure, ruleless being-as-such, the rule is at the very least conceptually [End Page 157] indispensable for this pure, mere being to be thinkable in the first place. In brief, however much one may want, for political or other reasons, to assign the exception a central place at the expense of the rule, that rule remains inescapable.Nonetheless, the inevitability of the rule should not lead us to conclude that it is also immutable, nor that we should adopt a conservatism that accepts the rule as a repressive normativity or as an inclusive and exclusive apparatus of judgment. That this is as impossible as it is undesirable is suggested by what we indicated under the second item: the exception is both above and beneath. The exception is the paradoxical given of that which at once escapes from existing categories and lacks all identity in that escape. The problem that Michael K and Bartleby, the second figure of exception we consider in this essay, present for the rule resides not just in the recalcitrance that allows them to show up the limits of the rule, but also in the doubling with which this goes hand in hand. Michael K and Bartleby are as pliant as they are obdurate, show great loyalty even... (shrink)

In this paper the question of the object in Freud’s metapsychology is sketched out from an economical point of view, that is in terms of pleasure and displeasure. This allows for a reading of Pascal’s wager that makes clear what interest Lacan had in discussing this one pensée at length in his Seminar on the Object of Psychoanalysis. The central issue in Lacan’s reading concerns the object a as a stake the subject has lost.