Respect is ruse-pact (discourse is semblance). This is a paradoxical equation.

If you accept and acknowledge that respect is ultimately ruse-pact (no discourse is beyond semblance) then you actually permit a respect that might not be a ruse-pact (a discourse that might not be a semblance).

But if you actively assert respect as being greater, having more value and being more valid than a ruse-pact, then you guarantee that whatever “respect” you have will surely degenerate into a ruse-pact.

This paradox is because respect is not under your control, you ultimately cannot understand it, it’s a spectral business: Respect is respectre (it’s a matter of refinding the object of love in transference). In other words, respect has an otherworldly or unworldly combinatorial quality (respectrality) that cannot be located and captured in the spatial world [1].

Identity politics obsessively reacts against the uncontrollable respectrality of respect, endeavors to map respect onto the spatial plane, and attempts to reduce it to a respectrum, to the recognition of a spectrum in terms of gender, autism or otherwise. But this is just a projection, in both psychological and mathematical senses; it collapses other dimensions, and it collapses the dimension of the Other.

Respectre is not respectrum (the combinatorial is not the spatial). There is nothing paradoxical about this non-equation. The reduction of respectre to respectrum is simply ideological, false and to be rejected.

The purpose and function of respectrum is to clearly distinguish respect from ruse-pact. In respectrum, a set of identities are substantialized by a set of symbols and are elevated to the ultimate constants of the universe that “should be respected” by all parties involved. This obviously relies on the ferocity of the superego.

The spatial projection of respectrum firmly establishes “respect” as a self-conscious ideology, signified by being “woke”. The ideology of respectrum makes a respectacle of itself. But this ideological display of “respect” actually entrenches a ruse-pact in the supposed respecters’ unconscious, and this (not so) secret ruse-pact perverts their networking into a wetworking [2].

When the ruse-pact of wetworking behind the supposed “respect” of networking is revealed and acknowledged, the spatial ideology of respectrum implodes, its fetishistic screen of wokeness drops, and the combinatorial respectre re-emerges on the horizon.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Spatial and Combinatorial”

[2] See “Networking and Wetworking”