the concept of the other

.. usually I try to not point to items which one needs to buy, order, pay a fee .. etc to be able to access them fully on this medium and form of a blog which lives from being freely accessible to those who have at least access to computers. But in this case the new issue of lacanian ink seems to be a good occasion to point to the magazin and its website, which also holds further links.

The latest issue of lacanian ink is entitled ‘From an other to the other‘ and brings together among others Zizek’s on the bad neighbour and specifically Badiou’s speeches on the ‘Truth art as a place for politics without a place’ (.. to be called up here) for the last issue’s concept of Profane Illuminations as a resume on the in/existence of the lacanian Big Other:
from Badiou’s
35 Propositions from Logiques des mondes
… Zizek goes on to explain how one of the ways to approach the inexistence of the big Other would be jokes, and how it is against the nature of jokes to say, now I will invent or produce a joke, jokes are always there. Jokes pop up out of nowhere…

One of the nicest paranoias is in the dream of what Lacan calls the Other of the other, which is the definition of God. Someone had developed an hypothesis over animals eating their language, you know their language can be very complex but it functions at the level of pure designation, animals cannot tell jokes-

So the idea is that the way God puts the divine spark in humans is telling them jokes.-

Words walked out of the university, out of the eventual discourse, and they marched into the galleries. Did the process change the discourse? What discourse are the words in galleries dealing with?

It would be easy to say that by the sole act words lose their meaning, like the directions on Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup can, still telling you to open it and eat the soup, or the same on Robert Gober’s litter bag telling you how to feed the cat… What you know about the tin and the package that sit in the gallery is that they are empty, even if they were full you are not supposed to open the them and consume the contents. And this is how the Campbell Soup and the litter bag become works of art.

.. who ever doubted the connection between art space auras and the big other might have gotten already curious after that beginning resumée and the obvious associating red line … ; ) .. interesting read to be expected. Sorrily as pointed above the online magazine just provides excerpts – a good reason to look if the next library holds the issue …

* Zizek has been mentioned here before
* and Badiou can be looked up in a general overview on wikipedia, or followed on the discussions on long sunday about post-structuralism, – german readers can get their special view by this rough review on taz from last autumn … or try a search and read via google …

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