Parallax View

Notes from Zizek:

Short Circuit: to see an interpreted text through a minor voice, a minor key; not with the aim of 'lowering' but of 'decentering,' of bringing to light the unthought.

Transcendental illusion: that the same language can be used for different phenomenon (see Cavell on Kierkegaard).

Parallax View: A constantly shifting perspective between two points that share no common space...a parallax gap. Cannot reduce the transcendental constitution to creation (God is not a concept..the world is).

Thought emerges between communities,from the exile.

The particular and the universal: ethnicity is a private use of reason..even though it is communal it remains private. Is the 'jump' a move away from false homes (idols) to a search for our real home, firm ground? Kant: we remain forever split between the two dimensions, freedom and causality, gravity and grace, a donkey with angel's wings. If we can reach out then we can only do so in a leap of faith, not on any grounds. Knowledge and Faith. the latter may be possible but we can know nothing of it. [Eventually, why should we even care about the metaphysical, what is , strictly speaking , non-sense?]

Homeless: the world-citizen...but this does not engage our particularity (see Raymond Williams: militant particularism). Abstract identification.Reason is only truly public when the singular individual identifies with an ethico-political principle. Each individual must identify with the universal law.

Subject/Object verbs: passivity: to subject oneself to the necessary..a higher fatalism , is not heteronomy. Object: resistance , movement.

Can antinomies be reduced to the terms of the other: a synthesis?
The transcendental-thing-in-itself is not just a thing beyond our grasp of reality; it is the 'beyond the grasp' , the gap, that constitutes it as a transcendental thing. The gap, the dihliz, cannot be reduced to inner or outer..zahir and batin..what is meant by 'and' here? Tafrah!

The transcendental is the gap between the noumenal and the phenomenal. Where does one begin..and where does the other end? The third man, the barzakh?

To move beyond this gap would be to lose one's humanity ( I can't help reading this in the minor key of Islam...the miraj). Beyond the gap one is either an animal or a god. Without the gap would we have hope? The absence of God is what allows God to Be, allows us to be (aniconism)..time is the space between me and You. We are marked by what we are not.

Be careful of what you wish for...we live in an age of leisure, when the pressure of immortality has fallen away. there are no more gaps: 'instant living.' For us, for us moderns, the disappearing of the gap is equivalent to the utilitarian subject who acts mechanically on his desires, who is a slave of his desires. desire and technology, mechanism, are brought together. There is no expectation, no imagination...only the calculus of pain and pleasure. Are we free only in that gap?

Freedom of the will: Duns Scotus...

In some readings the mistake of metaphysics is to subordinate that we are-the mere fact of our being- to an essence (a goal, a principle), to what we are. Ontological difference would be to de-centre us, to free us from any such essence..to just be.

The ontological difference is, now, not between man and a higher entity, something Beyond-being, a transcendent 'other, but within the phenomenal itself, within being. The Real is simultaneously the Thing which direct access is not possible and the obstacle that prevents this direct access: the noumenal and the gap. The Real is that which fragments reality, that which is only perceptible-if at all- in the movement between perspectives...it is what accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real.

The Real is also something that can be glimpsed , retroactively, through the fragments since it is an absence. Kant does not fully destroy metaphysics since the noumenal still exists, out there, whereas Hegel introduces the distinction , the gap, into the very heart of reality (immanence). there is no need to overcome the gap. The problem is the very search fro infinity, for a transcendental realm. The shift in perspectives is the Real (al-Haqq)...Reality is caught in the movement of our knowing it....