Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008
“Contradiction” designates the antagonistic relationship between what I am “for the others” — my symbolic determination — and what I am “in myself,”abstractedly from my relations to others.
It is the contradiction between the void of the subject’s pure “being-for-himself” and the signifying feature which represents him for the others, in Lacanian terms: between $ and S1.
More precisely, “contradiction” means that it is my very ‘alienation’ in the symbolic mandate, in S1, which retroactively makes $ — the void which eludes the hold of the mandate — out of my brute reality.” (Žižek Tarrying 1993,131)
Master signifiers are operators of subjectification. In Žižek’s account of subject formation, ego-level subjectifying identification must first fail in order for the void of $ to be illuminated. 211-212
The Žižekian subject emerges from the failure of subjectifying identifications. 220
The subject truly emerges through the coming to light of the unsuturable gap between itself and its multiple possible operators of identificatory subjectification — the upshot here being that all such operators are ultimately “bones” (in Lacan’s language, subjectification amounts to the progressive “cadaverization” or “corpsification” of $, its “fading” into the lifelessness of objectified reified identities mediated by skeletal structures consisting of signifier-like elements.) 231
Žižek’s reading of Hegel’s discussion of phrenology [the Spirit is a bone] makes clear yet again that the subject-for-itself, as an explicit, self-relating negativity devoid of any concrete determinateness (i.e., $-as-empty), surfaces only after the implosion of identification. The “That’s not me!” dis-identification bringing into view the void of $ occurs following several unsuccessful attempts at establishing lasting forms of “That’s me!” identification. 231
Of course, this is quite consonant with the basic spirit of Hegelian dialectical philosophy, given that, for Hegel, truth is reached not by avoiding error, but rather precisely by passing through error; the key insights of dialectics require that certain mistakes must be made before these insights disclose themselves. There are no shortcuts, no safe paths allowing for errors/mistakes to be bypassed in the progress toward subsequent stages of philosophical reflection (in this vein, bypassing the false ultimately blocks further movement in the direction of the true). 231
So it is with the Žižekian delineation of subject formation: the void of the pure self-reflexive negativity of $-as-empty doesn’t reveal itself until after the unfolding of a series of failed attempts to conceal this void through processes of identificatory subjectification. In other words, the faceless anonymity of the cogito-like subject is not, as Žižek sometimes insinuates, an a priori structural emptiness preexisting the sequences of subjectifying identifications that try in vain to fill up this hole in the fabric of constituted reality. Rather, this hole is gradually hollowed out through the increasingly apparent contingency of all operators of subjectification, a contingency that becomes apparent solely through the rise and fall of various temporarily hegemonic master signifiers of identity jostling and displacing one another. In short, the more frantic is the “mad dance of identification” the more visible is the identityless void of $. To paraphrase Marx, when all solid identities melt into air, the subject as devoid of any solid identity begins to emerge … 231
Both Dolar and Žižek are committed to a theory of subjectivity according to which the subject (more specifically, the fully constituted subject as a for-itself emptiness) is a forever-alienated X, a homeless misfit, inherently incapable of finding a proper place within the domains of either nature or culture. In fact, this barred S ($), in its various guises and manifestations, is the factor responsible for the barring of both the Real ($-as-in-itself is the immanent negativity perturbing the “not all” of being’s conflict-riddled substance) and the Symbolic ($-as-for-itself is the impossible-to-represent void defying reduction to the mediating sociocultural terms of the big Other — $-as-self-reflexive-negativity is, in a sense that dovetails nicely with Hegel’s equation of of the spirit with a bone, the proverbial “bone in the throat” of the symbolic order) 234
Consequently, Dolar and Zizek insist that there is always a stain/tain,a spot of opacity, on the surfaces of nature and culture interfering with the otherwise smooth two-way flow of dialectical reflection between thinking and being,between subject and object. Without this opaque obstacle i.e., bone), subjectivity would lose itself through full immersion in the immediacy of being; the subject would be drowned in and by the completeness of a self-enclosed substance (i.e.,a subjectless substance). An internal limit to the movement of Aufhebung preserves the (non-) being of $.
Both Dolar and Zizek regard the genuine Hegelian gesture condensed in the infinite judgment of his phrenological formula to be the sudden transformation of the subject’s failure to find itself amidst the debris of the world into a success (i.e., the lack of adequate externally mediated representation by concrete entities is subjectivity at its purest insofar as instances of this lack present the subject with chances to grasp itself self-reflexively as a negativity irreducible to representation). The idea of finally surmounting the division between the spirit of subjectivity and the bone of objectivity is a pseudo-Hegelian (rather than properly Hegelian) notion. 234