United We Lack: Todd McGowan‘s Response to Slavoj Žižek 

We need Zizek to come here

This channel will blow up someday and it will be well deserved!

37:24 I like Todd’s point here-that people cut against their own interests to keep fantasy alive, to secure that hidden pleasure which radiates from the failure to obtain “full” enjoyment (private jet, exotic car, mansion, personal island…) It’s along the same path as Zizek’s remarks about capitalism in his debate with Tyler Cowen. That one reason capitalism has remained attractive is precisely because _it’s unjust!_ One’s pride can remain intact because we can blame the injustice of the system rather than ourselves. In a just system I’m forced to confront my own weakness/deficiency/stupidity-in an unjust system I can remain proud despite my failures because I know the playing field wasn’t level..

I really like the "Reason is all real" portion, as it touches and is itself divine.

Striking as always!

Taken our time with Todd McGowan ❤ Love that guy

Excellent interview, Trey, and your questions were perfect to help bring out points of clarification in the disagreements of Dr. McGowan and Žižek, so well done in designing your structure of inquiry! I like how McGowan described the contradiction as ‘the point where a thing undermines itself and becomes what it isn’t’-a very succinct and eloquent way to phrase it. The description of “Hegelian Resolution” as a movement of external opposition to internal contradiction was also very nice, which arguably has a “Christ-like” element to it in “taking on the [oppositions] of the world,” per se. I also like how McGowan describes Hegel as interested in the movement from “certainty” to “truth,” which suggests why Blondel and Hegel can be connected, I think. I also really like how he described our ability to change the future by working to change the meaning of the past, not in “trying to create the future,” per se-that was great. Anyway, as always, well done!

Around the 4min 30 mark Todd says: "'aufhebung,' everyone knows that." ..... Yeah, no they don't 😆 Anyway, Treydon you are just the best - thank you for doing all this work, being so smart, working so hard. I sincerely appreciate what you've built. It's so awesome.

Great interview!

2:29 in Hegel’s words- “Identity is the identity of identity and non-identity”

5:03 “I don’t think it’s an infinite spiral downward.” maybe infinite spiral upwards?

I think that a great difference between Hegel and the Others (philosophers and non philosophers) is in his notion of totality. Reading Hegel's Logic and Phenomenology it became clear to me that: while all the Others think the concept in a "now", so this apple is this apple and cannot be a negation of this apple, or most sophisticately, this thing, informed by the categories or concepts a priori and by the pure intuitions a priori of time and space, is this thing and its negation cannot exist ("for now!"); for Hegel thinking (every)thing in relation to totality is necessary in order to seek (and eventually to overcome) contraddiction, not only in simply thinking the all in relation to that or that thing (that would be another way of "now thinking" - if I may continue to use this ridiculous terminology), but in thinking the all as a compressed form in which the totality of time is included (so this apple is a Dasein, a determinate being, a being with a non being, because I can beat this apple and negate this apple, maybe not now but further in time, so this apple is a finite being not because of external causality but in itself and so on...). This discourse is of course valid for the non empirical objects: the terror is intrinsically in the concept of the absolute freedom. But the argumentation has also to be taken the other way round: necessary of the contingent but also contingent of the necessary: this apple has a negation in itself, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be beaten by someone sooner or later (it could rot and disintegrate by itself); this absolute free regime could turn in an absolute unfree regime, but it also could not (it could rot and disintegrate by itself - as our postcapitalist system is doing).

Oh wow, at around 54... I really want to hear Todd talk about the first chapter of the 18th Brumaire

Are we not always changing the past through consciousness itself? And if so, wouldn’t it make more sense to take responsibility for this action(in a Lacanian sense)rather than pretending like we have a choice in the matter at all?

The enemies versus adversaries question really strikes me. Is there more written about the difference? It seems very important to theorizing the right/left divide

5:14 bookmark

Holy mackerel!

"... Schmidtian." He then goes on to say, "Carl Schmidt ..." I thought he was swearing politely! This language is beyond me.

45:09 “For me, Communism is just, as I emphasized, the name of a problem. It’s not a solution.” -Zizek, _Slavoj Žižek on His Stubborn Attachment to Communism_

Lacking as always!

What is the text in which Zizek criticizes McGowan?

Hegel: "Nature has to be contradictory to give birth to the contradictory subject." (I.e., like yields like). But if nature really were contradictory yielding but contradictory things wouldn't it possess the necessity then of producing something contradictory to its contradictory self--i.e., only things noncontradictory?

Mmmm at around 44 minutes in, Todd's talking about the end of history. Maybe this is a naive point, but wouldn't a materialist rejoinder to this be that even though hegel had this thought and wrote it down, that we haven't yet overcome the overcoming of contradiction? In the same way that the utopian socialists thought that the only reason we weren't in socialism yet was that nobody had thought of it before. (I don't think Todd's argument is that silly, but this seems pretty important)

Whenever Todd has his “funny slips” i experience the sublime, I mean the nothingness, positively charged

47:50 Gold death of God is that which of Christian is becoming for itself. Trey helping modern thru its internal contradictions.