“Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian Reformation: Giving a Hearing to The Parallax View (PV)”
Adrian Johnston
diacritics / spring 2007
37.1: 3–20
Apart from the task of denouncing falsifying popular pictures of Hegel, one of Žižek’s other driving ambitions in this book is the desire to formulate a fundamental ontology appropriate to the theory of subjectivity mapped out over the course of his entire intellectual itinerary (a theory informed by Kant and post-Kantian German idealism combined with Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology). And, herein, the articulation of such an ontology appropriately gets entangled, via reflections on the nature of the brain, with the latest instantiations of the perennial philosophical problem of the relationship between mind and body. Žižek grants that the central nervous system is, in at least several undeniable and important senses, the material, corporeal ground of the subject, the bodily being without which there cannot be the parlêtre (speaking being).
whereas Kantian transcendental idealism treats the subjectively mediated structures (including various dichotomous splits found therein) which it analyzes as inexplicable givens, Žižek’s Hegel-inspired ontology purports to be able to get back behind these structures so as to explain their very emergence in the first place, both historically and materially. Before delving deeper into the essential features of Žižek’s Hegelian dialectical materialism, it should be asked: Why is exhuming the corpus of an allegedly materialist Hegel important, especially today? Žižek depicts the current intellectual situation as one in which a false forced choice between either “mechanical materialism” (that is, a reductive approach in which material being is treated as nothing more than an aggregate of physical bodies bumping and grinding against each other) or “idealist obscurantism” (that is, a reaction against mechanical materialism that insists upon the existence of a sharp dehiscence between the physical and the metaphysical) is repeatedly presented in diverse forms of packaging [PV 4]. Despite cutting-edge work in the contemporary sciences appearing to vindicate after-the-fact the intuitions contained in the philosophies of nature elaborated by the early nineteenth-century German idealists, these sciences and the majority of those who claim to represent them have tended to turn a blind eye to the theoretical resources contained in the writings of, among others, Schelling and Hegel (this is unsurprising, given that twentieth-century Anglo-American Analytic philosophy arose, in part, as a reaction against nineteenth-century British Hegelianism). Throughout The Parallax View, Žižek, departing from the work of others engaged with the natural sciences (especially cognitive neuroscience) who either gesture in the direction of or strive to develop more sophisticated materialist theoretical frameworks (such as Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, Joseph LeDoux, Catherine Malabou, Thomas Metzinger, and Francisco Varela), aims to show not only that today’s sciences would be better able to express their insights if equipped with the concepts and terminology of a dialectical materialism formulated in dialogue with German idealism. Žižek’s thesis goes one step further: the natural sciences cannot even properly come to recognize and realize their true results if their fashions of self-understanding continue to remain mired in the ill-framed debates staged between, on the one hand, varieties of materialism whose notions of matter are no more sophisticated than seventeenth-century conceptions of “corporeal substance” moved solely by the