'Stubborn Attachments'

- Joe Malia

The advantage of Hegel's account of disciplinary practices over Foucault's is that Hegel, as it were, provides the transcendental genesis of discipline by answering the question: how and why does it let itself be caught in it? Hegel's answer, of course, is the fear of Death, the absolute Master: since my bodily existence is subject to natural corruption, and since I cannot ge rid of the body and thoroughly negate it, the only thing I can do is embody negativity: instead of directly negating my body, I live my bodily existence as the permanent negativization, subordination, mortification, disciplining, of the body...
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So we are back at the problematic of 'stubborn attachment', since it is absolutely crucial to bear in mind the co=dependence between detachability from any determinate content and excessive attachment to a particular object that makes us indifferent to all other objects - such an object is what Lacan, following Kant, calls 'negative magnitude', that is, an object which, in its very positive presence, acts as a stand-in for the void of Nothingness (or for the abyss of the impossible Thing), so that wanting this particular object, maintaining one's 'stubborn attachment' to it come what may, is the very concrete form of 'wanting Nothingness'.

- Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p.106-07

And TIQQUN, from Soft Targets:

Gloss: What do we mean by Imaginary Party? That the Outside has moved inside. The turning outside-in of the liberal State into Empire has occurred silently, without violence, as if in the night. From without, nothing seems to have changed. ONE is simply struck by the sudden uselessness of so many familiar things, and the old divisions that once had so much weight now no longer function.
A nagging little neurosis makes ONE want to continue to distinguish the just from the unjust, the healthy from the sick, work from leisure, the criminal from the innocent or the ordinary from the monstrous. But we need to acknowledge the obvious: these old divisions are no longer intelligible.
They have not been suppressed, however. They are still there, but without consequences. The norm has not abolished the Law—it has merely voided the Law and ordered it to its own ends, in line with its own immanent practices of calculation and administration. When the Law enters the force field of the norm, it loses all its faded luster of transcendence, and can only function in a sort of state of exception that repeats itself indefinitely.
The state of exception is the normal regime of the Law.
There is no longer any visible Outside—no pure Nature, no Great Madness, no Great Criminal and no classical Great Proletariat with its really-existing Homeland of Justice and Liberty. These have all disappeared, above all because they have lost their imaginary force of attraction. There is no longer any Outside precisely because there is exteriority at every point of the biopolitical tissue. Madness, crime or the proletariat no longer make up a world outside the world, their own ghetto with or without walls. With the dissipation of the social, they have become reversible modalities, latent violences or suspect possibilities of each and every body. This suspicion is what justifies the continuous socialization of society, the perfecting of the micro-mechanisms of control. Not that Biopower claims to directly govern men and things—to the contrary, it governs possibilities and conditions of possibility.
Everything that had its source in the Outside (illegality, first of all, but also misery and death) is, to the extent it is administered, taken up in an integration that positively eliminates these exteriorities in order to permit their subsequent recirculation. This is why, at the heart of Biopower, there is no such thing as death: there is only murder, and its circulation. Through statistics, an entire network of causalities embeds each living thing in an aggregate of deaths. . . . The truth is that there is no margin that can be identified as such, since liminarity itself has become the intimate condition of all that exists.
The Law fixes divisions and establishes distinctions, it outlines what defies it, and recognizes a world it both forms and gives duration to; the Law ceaselessly names and enumerates what is outlawed. The Law says its outside. The inaugural gesture of the Law is to exclude its own foundation—sovereignty, violence. But the norm has no sense of foundation. It has no memory, and stays as close as possible to the present, always claiming to be on the side of immanence. Where the Law gives itself a face and honors the sovereignty of what is outside it, the norm is acephalic—headless—and is delighted every time ONE severs the head of some sovereign. The norm has no hieros, no place of its own, but acts invisibly over the entirety of the gridded, edgeless space it distributes. Nothing and no one is excluded from this space, or rejected into an identifiable exteriority. What is called "excluded" is here only a modality of a generalized inclusion. It is therefore no longer anything but a single and same field, homogenous but diffracted into an infinity of nuances, a regime of limitless integration that sets out to maintain the play between forms-of-life at the lowest possible level of intensity. In this space, an ungraspable agency of totalization reigns, dissolving, digesting, absorbing and deactivating all alterity a priori. A process of omnivorous immanentization deploys itself on a planetary scale. The goal: make the world a continuous biopolitical tissue. In the meantime, the norm stands watch.
Under the regime of the norm, nothing is normal and everything must be normalized. What functions here is a positive paradigm of power. The norm produces all that is, insofar as the norm is itself, ONE says, the ens realissimum. Whatever does not belong to its mode of unveiling is not, and whatever is not cannot belong to its mode of unveiling. Under the regime of the norm, negativity is never recognized as such, but reduced to a simple default of the norm, a hole to be taken back up into the biopolitical tissue. Negativity, this power that is not supposed to exist, is quite logically abandoned to a traceless disappearance. Not without reason, since the Imaginary Party is the Outside of the world without Outside, the essential discontinuity lodged at the heart of a world rendered continuous.