Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008
Grund, rather than being the hard, ontological substance behind the ephemeral facade of experience (as it’s been characterized here thus far), is, in fact, “preontological“: “The enigma resides in the fact that Ground is ontologically non-accomplished, ‘less’ than Existence, but it is precisely as such that it corrodes the consistency of the ontological edifice of Existence from within (Žižek 1996b,62; Žižek 1997a,7).
In The Abyss of Freedom, Žižek proclaims that “the Ground is in itself ontologically hindered, hampered, its status is in a radical sense preontological — it only ‘is’ sous rature, in the mode of its own withdrawal” (Zizek1997a,6).
And in The Plague of Fantasies, he utilizes this interpretation of the Schellingian Real as preontological (instead of it being the ontological per se) to identify Schelling as a thinker who completes Kant’s insight into the “ontological incompleteness of reality” 76
Sous rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Martin Heidegger. Usually translated as ‘under erasure’, it involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place.
Žižek quote
German Idealism outlined the precise contours of this pre-ontological dimension which precedes and eludes the ontological constitution of reality… Kant was the first to detect this crack in the ontological edifice of reality, if (what we experience as) “objective reality” is not simply given” out there, “waiting to be perceived by the subject, but an artificial composite constituted through the subject’s active participation — that is, through the act of transcendental synthesis — then the question crops up sooner or later what is the status of the uncanny X which precedes transcendentally constituted reality? It was Schelling, of course, who gave the most detailed account of this X in his notion of the Ground of Existence.. .the pre-logical Real which remains for ever the elusive Ground of Reason which can never be grasped “as such,” merely glimpsed in the very gesture of its withdrawal (Žižek 1997c, 208) 77