Health-based ethics replaces paternal law with amoral affective engineering

Evidence

In Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek famously argues that a certain Spinozism is the ideology of late capitalism. Žižek believes that Spinoza’s rejection of deontology for an ethics based around the concept of health is allegedly flat with capitalism’s amoral affective engineering. The famous example here is Spinoza’s reading of the myth of the Fall and the foundation of Law. On Spinoza’s account, God does not condemn Adam for eating the apple because the action is wrong; he tells him that he should not consume the apple because it will poison him. For Žižek, this dramatizes the termination of the Father function. An act is wrong not because Daddy says so; Daddy only says it is ‘wrong’ because performing the act will be harmful to us. In Žižek’s view, Spinoza’s move both deprives the grounding of Law in a sadistic act of scission (the cruel cut of castration), at the same time as it denies the ungrounded positing of agency in an act of pure volition, in which the subject assumes responsibility for everything. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 149

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains Spinoza’s anti-deontological move (the Fall read as health warning) and how it becomes the ideology of late capitalism.
• XREF: Directly parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ essay logic where codified norms are replaced by individualized conduct guidance. — connects to: Health-based ethics replace prohibition with harm-diagnosis — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 149

Related

• Health-based ethics replace prohibition with harm-diagnosis (similarity 0.95)
• An ethics grounded in health rather than prohibition terminates the Father function. (similarity 0.92)

Broader Connections

• Health-based ethics replace prohibition with harm-diagnosis #expands (0.95) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 149