by Slavoj Žižek
- online copy (without introduction)
Introduction
From a Hegelian standpoint, one can say that what Deleuze fails to fully perceive is what, among others Schelling saw clearly; the ultimate identity of these two features, of the lowest and the highest: it is precisely THROUGH its stubborn attachment to his singular Self that a human individual is able to extract itself from the particular convolutions of actual life (with its circular movement of generation and corruption) and enter in relation with virtual eternity. This is why (insofar as another name for this egotistic stubborn attachment is Evil) Evil is a formal condition of the rise of the Good; it literally creates the space for the Good. And do we not encounter here the ultimate case of sutured by the singularity of Evil?
The Reality of the Virtual
what matters to Deleuze is not virtual reality, but the reality of the virtual (which, in Lacanian terms, is the Real.)
^ deserves further explanation
The genius of Deleuze resides in his notion of “transcendental empiricism”: in contrast to the standard notion of the transcendental as the formal conceptual network which structures the rich flow of empirical data, the Deleuzian “transcendental” is infinitely RICHER than reality - it is the infinite potential field of virtualities out of which reality is actualized.
standard transcendantal == Wittgenstein’s “the world”? ie. all that is the case, ie. Brandomian network of inferential relations
comparison with objective idealism, and speculative realism?
… should NOT be interpreted as an “allegory” with a fixed “deeper meaning,” but as a pure “mechanic” intensity beyond meaning …
That is to say, we totally misread Nashville if we locate the songs within the global horizon of the ironico-critical depiction of the vacuity and ritualized commercial alienation of the universe of American country music: on the contrary, we are allowed - even seduced into - fully enjoying the music on its own, in its affective intensity, independently of Altman’s obvious critico-ideological project. (And, incidentally, the same goes for the songs from Brecht’s great pieces: their musical pleasure is independent of their ideological message.)
a clue! .. to what music is
one is tempted to read the Altmanian “despair and anxiety” as the deceiving obverse of the more affirmative immersion into the multitude of subliminal intensities.
subliminal intensities here may refer to the inferential relations of the ritual one is not invited to make explicit?