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From hypo-critical reason to hippo-queery-tickle reason: Just a dream → A just dream → Adjust dream — Işık Barış Fidaner

🫣🙃😏 Hypocritique 🫣🙃😏

Freud articulated the elementary formula of critical reason in relation to dreams:

In my view the contemptuous critical judgement, “It’s only a dream”, appears in a dream when the censorship, which is never quite asleep, feels that it has been taken unawares by a dream which has already been allowed through. It is too late to suppress it, and accordingly the censorship uses these words to meet the anxiety or the distressing feeling aroused by it. The phrase is an example of esprit d’escalier [staircase wit: too late to respond] on the part of the psychical censorship. (The Interpretation of Dreams)

Freud made it clear that a dream is never “just a dream”, it always bears some truth, it is a “just dream”. Therefore, in order to do justice to the dream, one must acknowledge and interpret precisely what is just and precise about it. This is why analysis proper eliminates criticism and “critical analysis” is an oxymoron.

Since the elementary purpose of critical reason is to bury the truth of the dream under a superegoic self-righteous contempt, it would be more fitting to call it hypo-critical reason. It is the very critical censorship that adorns the dream with its hypocritical quality.

This term “hypo-critical reason” calls out the conning of reason that brought about the hyperego [1]. It was Marx and Engels who said in the “critique of critical criticism” that the beautiful soul of (hypo)critical reason can only keep afloat by constantly complaining about and pushing down and disavowing its dialectical opposite, the “uncritical mass”:

Critical criticism also assigns a place to the uncritical mass. It makes unbiased representatives of the latter correspond with it, acknowledge the opposition to itself, criticism, as important and absolute, and utter a fearful cry for redemption from this opposition. (The Holy Family)

Marx famously said that “religion is the opium of the people”. In terms of the Matrix, religion is the blue pill [2]. Would the critique of religion then be the red pill that is supposed to liberate the people from the opium of religion?

Careful: Marx and Engels did not present a simple critique of religion. Instead they presented a “critique of criticism” about religion. Moreover, their precise target was not religion but what was hypo-critical in its critique, hence the “critique of critical criticism”. Their topic was precisely what religion and its criticism had in common, the dialectical unity of their opposition, namely, the conning of reason.

Now let’s cover a wider Lacanian field by paraphrasing Freud’s contemptuous critical judgement:
1) It’s just a dream: It’s imaginary, not symbolic.
2) It’s just empty words: It’s symbolic, not real.
3) It’s just an opium to hook you: It’s the blue pill, not the red pill. It’s just symbolic reality, not the real beyond the symbolic.
4) You are just masturbating: Your enjoyment is unworthy of my world. I am the reality that refuses your real. I am the master-bait that declares that you masturbate.

Here is the exact relation that Marx and Engels pointed out: Critical criticism is the reality that refuses the real of the uncritical mass. Critical criticism is thus two-faced:
1) It is hypo-critical insofar as it is in a perverse collusion with the uncritical mass that it refuses.
2) It is hyper-critical insofar as it vindicates and exempts its hyperego from the indecency/absurdity of the uncritical mass that it refuses.
The self-conning of critical reason can only be overturned by a reason that owns up to its lack (Lacan = Lack-own [3]) and admits to its indecent/absurd element.

Let’s call this alternative the hippo-queery-tickle reason:
1) “Tickle” refers to Žižek’s Ticklish Subject.
2) “Queery” refers to the non-identical queeriness in enjoying one’s symptom [4].
3) “Hippo” refers to the fact that Herbert Marcuse loved hippopotami [5].
The hippo-queery-tickle reason is all about interpreting what is just in dreams and thereby adjusting (along with) it.

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 “The Conning of Reason Brought About The Hyperego”

[2] See “Blue Pill or Red Pill: Masturbate or Master-bait”

[3] See “Lack-own and Ideoanalysis”

[4] See “Identity and Disparity of Same and Different”

[5] See the documentary “Herbert’s Hippopotamus: Marcuse and Revolution in Paradise” (1996).

Slavoj Žižek’s “critique of critique” in Surplus Enjoyment (2022) was inspired by this text a little bit (peu du réel).

justice to just this

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