[CX-L] 'Zizekian pyrotechnics'

[Kevin Sanchez]

{included below is a post from january by mark jones that recieved 
insufficient e-love.}

_

"At the Lacanian conference The Subject - Encore at UCLA in March 1999, one 
of the participants discussed a recent medico-legal case of a woman who, on 
religious grounds, unconditionally rejected the transfusion that would have 
saved her life. The judge before whom she was brought asked her: 'What if 
you were to be submitted to transfusion *against your will*? Would this 
condemn you to a damnation and hell in your afterlife?' After a brief 
deliberation, the woman answered: 'I guess the answer is no.' When he heard 
this, the judge took the responsibility upon himself: in order to save the 
woman's life without putting her in an unbearable moral predicament, he 
proclaimed her irresponsible, and ordered the transfusion against her will. 
What is the ethical status of this decision?" [1]

zizek says that while the participants at the conference admired the 
inventiveness of the judge's solution, from a psychoanalytical perspective, 
the decision was evidently false. either the woman really wanted to live and 
the judge's question cleverly affirmed her true desire without confronting 
her contradictory religious beliefs (i.e. the woman was being less than 
honest), or the woman really didn't want to live and the judge violated her 
true desire by wrongly labelling her as irresponsible (i.e. the judge was 
being less than honest). so if the aim of ethical analysis is to seek a 
discourse unburdened by deception, then the judge in question failed. but 
maybe...

"... [t]hat is why the call for justice is never, never fully answered. That 
is why no one can say 'I am just'. If someone tells you 'I am just,' you can 
be sure that he or she is wrong, because being just is not a matter of 
theoretical determination. I cannot know that I am just. I can know that I 
am right. I can see that I act in agreement with norms, with the law. I stop 
at the red light. I am right. That is no problem. But that does not mean 
that I am just. To speak of justice is not a matter of knowledge, of 
theoretical judgment. That's why it's not a matter of calculation. You can 
calculate what is right. You can judge; you can say that, according to the 
code, such and such a misdeed deserves ten years of imprisonment. That may 
be a matter of calculation. But the fact that it is rightly calculated does 
not mean that it is just. A judge, if she wants to be just, cannot content 
herself with applying the law. She has to reinvent the law each time. If she 
wants to be responsible, to make a decision, she has not simply to apply the 
law, as a coded program, to a given case, but to reivent in a singular 
situation a new just relationship; that means that justice cannot be reduced 
to a calculation of sanctions, punishments, rewards. That may be right or in 
agreement with the law, but that is not justice. Justice, if it has to do 
with the other, with the infinite distance of the other, is always unequal 
to the other, is always incalculable. You cannot calculate justice.

Levinas says somewhere that the definition of justice - which is very 
minimal but which I love, which I think is really rigorous - is that justice 
is the relation to the other. That is all. Once you relate to the other as 
the other, then something incalculable comes on the scene, something which 
cannot be reduced to the law or to the history of legal structures. That is 
what gives deconstruction its movement, that is, constantly to suspect, to 
criticize the given determinations of culture, of institutions, of legal 
systems, not in order to destroy them or simply to cancel them, but to be 
just with justice, to respect this relation to the other as justice." [2]

derrida says that even though there is a point or limit beyond which our 
calculations must fail, this doesn't mean we should give up calculating, but 
instead this pushes us to calculate as rigorously as possible. with this in 
mind, one asks, what is the ethical status of being a debate judge, of 
deciding a round? ...

perhaps grappling with this, mark jones (writing here, 
http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200501/0224.html) asks : "Can I as a critic 
at the back of the room ask the debaters to decide who won any particular 
round. For example, before I render a decision, can I ask each team member 
to fill out an HONEST BALLOT, where each team member, sitting away from 
his/her partner, votes for the winning team."

i'd suggest informing the teams beforehand, but this offers an interesting 
experiment in reworking the role of the judge. one can even concieve of such 
a round within a strictly judicial context: the decision of the debaters 
(4-0, 3-1, 2-2) functions as a lower court ruling, and the judge (as the 
supreme court) grants certiorari at their discretion.

debaters might see this new decision-mechanism as one more paradigm-tool in 
a judge's repertoire, and prior to the round, a good judge might offer 
debaters several paradigms from which to choose. participants must resist 
the false binary of either accepting traditional formalities or opposing any 
formality as such and instead seek to multiply unique discursive formations 
in opposition to the uniformity of the current tournament-contest model, 
because...

"[t]he bookish [non-inteventionist] doctrine of judgment is moderate only in 
appearance[;] it in fact condemns us to an endless servitude and annuls any 
liberatory process. ... Artaud presents this "body without organs" that God 
has stolen from us in order to palm off an organized boy without which is 
judgment could not be exercised. The body without organs is an affective, 
intensive, anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds, 
and gradients. It is traversed by a powerful, nonorganic vitality. ...

The way to escape judgment is to make yourself a body without organs, to 
find your body without organs. ... [A] body of justice in which the segments 
are dissolved, the differentiations lost, and the hierarchies thrown into 
confusion, a body that retains nothing but intensities that make up 
uncertain zones, that traverse these zones at full speed and confront the 
powers in them ... combat, combat everywhere; it is combat that replaces 
judgment. ...

Combat is not war. War is only a combat-against, a will to destruction, a 
judgment of God that turns destruction into something "just." The judgment 
of God is on the side of war, and not combat. Even when it takes hold of 
other forces, the force of war begins by mutilating these forces, reducing 
them to their lowest state. In war, the will to power merely means that the 
will wants strength as a maximum of power or domination. ... Combat, by 
constract, is a powerful, nonorganic vitality that supplements force with 
force, and enriches whatever it takes hold of. ... A decision is not a 
judgment, nor is it the organic consequence of a judgment: it springs 
vitally from a whirlwind of forces that leads us into combat. It resolves 
the combat without suppressing or ending it. ...

What disturbed us was that in renouncing judgment we had the impression of 
depriving ourselves of any means of distinguishing between existing beings, 
between modes of existence, as if everything were now of equal value. But is 
it not rather judgment that presupposes preexisting critera (higher values), 
criterai that preexist for all time (to the infinity of time), so that it 
can neither apprehend what is new in an existing being, nor even sense the 
creation of a mode of existence? Such a mode is created vitally, through 
combat, in the insomnia of sleep, and not without a certain cruelty toward 
itself: nothing of all this is the result of judgment. Judgment prevents the 
emergence of any new mode of existence. For the latter creates itself 
through its own forces, that is, through the forces it is able to harness, 
and is valid in and of itself inasmuch as it brings the new combination into 
existence. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not 
judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of 
equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or 
distinguised only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could 
ever bear on the work to come? It is not a question of judging other 
existing beings, but of sensing whether they agree or disagree with us, that 
is, whether they bring forces to us, or whether they return us to the 
miseries of war, to the poverty of the dream, to the rigors of 
organization." [3]

for application of the above argument to debate, see here : 
http://cross-x.com/vb/showthread.php?t=949536 ... specifically, post #25.

.k (kevin.sanchez at gmail.com)

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[1]   Zizek. The Fragile Absolute - or, why is the christian legacy worth 
fighting for? 2000. p137.

[2]   Derrida. Deconstruction in A Nutshell : A Conversation. 1997. pp17-8.

[3]   Deleuze. Essays: critical & clinical. 'To Have Done with Judgment'. 
1993. pp128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135.
_

p.s. still no response from the a.f.a. president, handbook manufacturers, or 
big programs in regards to these two posts, 
http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200504/0146.html , 
http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200504/0056.html ... which revisit some of 
the themes of the preceeding post.

_

What expert judgment could ever bear on the work to come?