Žižek. Organs without Bodies. Deleuze and Consequences. Routledge. 2004. (50-51)
Taking Deleuze from Behind
And, what is the Hegelian Begriff as opposed to the nominalist “notion,” the result of abstracting shared features from a series of particular objects?
Often, we stumble on a particular case that does not fully “fit” its universal species, that is “atypical”; the next step is to acknowledge that every particular is “atypical;’ that the universal species exists only in exceptions, that there is a structural tension between the Universal and the Particular.
At this point, we become aware that the Universal is no longer just an empty neutral container of its subspecies but an entity in tension with each and every one of its species. The universal Notion thus acquires a dynamics of its own. More precisely, the true Universal is this very antagonistic dynamics between the Universal and the Particular.
It is at this point that we pass from “abstract” to “concrete” Universal — at the point when we acknowledge that every Particular is an “exception,” and, consequently, that the Universal, far from “containing” its particular content, excludes it (or is excluded by it).
This exclusion renders the Universal itself particular (it is not truly universal, since it cannot grasp or contain the particular content), yet this very failure is its strength: the Universal is thus simultaneously posited as the Particular.
The supreme political case of such a gesture is the moment of revolutionary “councils” taking over – the moment of “ahistorical” collective freedom, of “eternity in time;’ of what Benjamin called “dialectic in suspense. ” Or, as Alain Badiou would have put it in his Platonic terms, in such historical moments, the eternal Idea of Freedom appears/transpires.
Even if its realization is always “impure,” one should stick to the eternal Idea, which is not just a “generalization” of particular experiences of freedom but their inherent Measure.
(To which, of course, Hegel would have retorted that the Thermidor occurs because such a direct actualization of freedom has to appear as Terror.)
One should insert this appearance of Freedom into the series of exceptional temporalities, together with the Messianic time first formulated by Paul — the time when “the end is near: the time of the end of time (as Giorgio Agamben puts it) when, in an ontological “state of emergency;’ one should suspend one’s full identification with one’s sociosymbolic identity and act as if this identity is unimportant, a matter of indifference.
(This exceptional temporality is to be strictly distinguished from the ecstatic-carnivalesque suspension of Order in which things are turned upside-down in a generalized orgy.)