Abstract
In a note published in 1932 under the heading “Tolstoy,” Wittgenstein considered the view that a thing (Gegenstand) is important only if it can be understood by everyone. While inclined to agree with this proposition, he saw one stumbling block to its truth. The problem was not that in order to understand such a significant and important thing it was necessary to master a specialized language or some kind of technical knowledge, but rather that there might be a conflict between understanding certain kinds of propositions and human desire. In other words, it might be difficult to understand something that you don’t want to understand when it conflicts with what you want to believe is true. He concluded that the most obvious thing—I would say, truth—may offer the greatest resistance to understanding. In other words, when truth is communicated, the will may resist more than the intellect.1
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Notes
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 17–17e.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958; originally published by The Macmillan Company, 1953), 47e, remark 109; and Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 462. Henceforth, for all of Wittgensteins’s texts, references are to numbered remarks (italicized) unless page numbers (not italicized) are indicated.
Gilbert Ryle, “Systematically Misleading Expressions,” Collected Papers, vol. 2: Collected Essays, 1929–1968 (London: Hutchinson and Company, 1961), 39–62.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961; originally published in German, 1921), 2.1–2.18.
Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, ed. and trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 37; and Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), lvi–lvii.
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 286–94. On the distinction between a situation and its state, see Meditations 7 and 8, 81–101.
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, newly revised ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 617.
Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses 1955–1956, book 3 of The Seminar, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 250.
Ibid., 268–69. On points de capiton, see Jacques Lacan, Ècrits (Paris: Èditions du Seuil, 1966), 503; Ècrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2005), 419; Ècrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 154.
R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1983).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 43–44.
Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 72.
Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 180.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 403.
Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 79.
Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes, L’être et l’événement 2 (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 212–13.
Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2004), 101.
Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 340–48.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 72.
Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, book 7 of The Seminar, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 12.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. and trans. James Stra-chey (New York: Norton, 1990), 28–37.
Jacques Lacan, Encore, book 20 of Le sèminaire, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 84, 90; for the English translation, see On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–73, book 20, Encore, of The Seminar, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 90, 98.
Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Norton, 1990), 40.
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), 68–77.
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 111.
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© 2009 Patrick McGee
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McGee, P. (2009). The Transcendental Ordinary. In: Theory and the Common from Marx to Badiou. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620605_5
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