Capital Owes You Nothing: On Pascal and Lacan by Dominiek Hoens
We welcome Dominiek Hoens for a lecture on Jacques Lacan’s game-theoretical reading of Pascal’s wager that focuses on the novelty of his approach to this well-known pensée is highlighted. Hoens situates the reception of Pascal’s work in France in the 50’s and 60’s is outlined, with particular attention to Lucien Goldmann’s Marxian reading of Pascal presented in The Hidden God (1955) and Lacan's confrontation with Goldmann in Seminar XVI. Lacan’s analysis helps us to detail this renunciation - one loses ‘nothing’ yet one clings to it as if it were ‘something’ - and to understand that pleasure is not only something one has or experiences, but something one virtually is and which can be put at stake to provoke the Other’s desire (c.f. divine grace). Subsequently, the Pascalian wager will be brought into dialogue with another, contemporaneous theological discussion, known as the ‘doctrine of pure love’ developed by François Fénelon. The latter is considered as making the one additional step which Pascal recoils from taking, namely that divine grace is not only a matter of being saved by God, but also an active affirmation of the divine will, even if it wills our own demise. This ‘logical’ moment, hidden in Pascal’s argument yet underlined by Fénelon, allows for an understanding of the present moment: namely, how neoliberal subjectivity is characterized by a love for Capital, even though it treats and positions the subject as superfluous waste.
---------
Key Moments
0:00 - Introduction to Dominiek Hoens
2:03 - Lecture: Capital Owes You Nothing: On Pascal and Lacan
1:08:19 - Q & A
Пікірлер: 6
That was an incredible presentation. I can't wait for this book.
the wager is why ambiguous endings work. The black sopranos ending reveals your desire and how one is angry one did not get it. It is also why the Lacan short session works for some people (something I am of mixed feelings with for it can become unethical)
capital owes us the commons
In terms of a wager made in Capital, recall that in Chapter 6 Marx tells us "In every country in which the capitalist mode of production reigns, it is the custom not to pay for labour-power before it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, as for example, the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-power is advanced to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist. " I'm more interested in how the worker 'advances' labor-power as a 'credit' to the capital in terms of a wager. The worker already incurs the loss, but do they believe or merely follow the ritual?
@Barklord
26 күн бұрын
Have you ever read David P. Ellerman's critique of wage labour and the (liberal) labour theory of property? I think it's interesting in a legal sense, in that our current property laws should exclude renting humans for wages. He says that defacto responsibility for work is not rewarded with a corresponfing property right in the same way that defacto responsibility for illegal actions on the job are punished equally irrespective of whether one is or is not compensated with a wage.
1:24:06 the question posed here is fascinating. This program has been excellent. I would like to point to Lukacs’ criticism of Freud in the Schopenhauer section of the Destruction of Reason which alongside certain quotes by Freud seem to preclude the unconscious dimension of psychoanalytic concepts from at least Lukacs’ form of Marxism. Take for example this entry from Freuds late Findings, Ideas, Problems “Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it.” This statement along with Freud’s investigations into mysticism clash quite strongly with the principles by which Lukacs criticizes Schopenhauer’s neo-Kantian subjective idealism. Lacan’s counter-criticism of class consciousness in this Seminar is intriguing because to me it comes from a dimension that I’m not sure Lukacs treated because Lacan’s criticism is strongly based on his definition of the signifier and the effect of the symbolic on the subject. Much to puzzle over here