barred real Being as incomplete internally inconsistent

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008

In Organs Without Bodies, Žižek insists,while discussing Kant, that free­dom (in the form of autonomous subjectivity) is possible only if being, construed as whatever serves as an ultimate grounding ontological reg­ister, is inherently incomplete and internally inconsistent. … “Schelling was first and foremost a philosopher of freedom” [Indivisible Remainder, 15]

He goes on bluntly to assert that “either subjectivity is an illusion or reality is in itself (not only epistemologically) not-All (Organs Without Bodies 2004,115).

If being is entirely at one with itself, if material nature is a perfectly functioning machine in which each and every cog and component is organically coordinated into the single, massive whole of an uninterrupted “One-All,” then no space remains, no clearing is held open, for the emergence of something capable of (at least from time to time) transcending or breaking with this stifling ontological closure.

Being must be originally and primordially unbalanced in order for the subject as a (trans-)ontological excess to become operative.

As Schelling himself succinctly states, “Were the first nature in harmony with itself, it would remain so. It would be constantly One and would never become Two” . Those points and moments where being becomes dysfunctional (i.e.,when,to put it loosely, “the run of things” breaks down) signal the possibility for the genesis of subjectivity as that which cannot be reduced to a mere circuit in the machinery of a base material substratum in which everything is exhaustively integrated with everything else.

Zizek makes the move of identifying the Schellingian-Lacanian subject with this inconsistency internal to the ontological edifice itself: “Sub­ject designates the ‘imperfection’ of Substance, the inherent gap, self deferral, distance-from-itself, which forever prevents Substance from fully realizing itself, from becoming’ fully itself” (The Abyss of Freedom, 7)