Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.
An ethics grounded in reference to the traumatic Real which resists symbolization, the Real which is experienced in the encounter with the abyss of the Other’s desire
Che Vuoi? What do you want [from me]?
… the trauma qua real is not the ultimate external referent of the symbolic process, but precisely that X which forever hinders any neutral representation of external referential reality. … the Real qua traumatic antagonism is, as it were, the objective factor of subjectivization itself; it is the object which accounts for the failure of every neutral-objective representation, the object which ‘pathologizes’ the subject’s gaze or approach, makes it biased, pulls it askew. … the very stain or spot which disturbs and blurs our ‘direct’ perception of reality — which ‘bends’ the direct straight line from our eyes to the perceived object. (Plague of Fantasies 214)
sexual difference is not some mysterious inaccessible X which can never by symbolized but, rather, the very obstacle to this symbolization, the stain which forever keeps the Real apart from the modes of its symbolization. Crucial to the notion fo the Real is this coincidence of the inaccessible X with the obstacle which makes it inaccessible — as in Heidegger, who emphasizes again and again how Being is not simply ‘withdrawn’: Being ‘is ‘nothing but its own withdrawal…’ 216-217
… the unique strength of Kant’s ethics lies in this very formal indeterminacy: moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty. that is to say, it is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself — which means that the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of ‘translating’ the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. In this precise sense, the point of Kant’s ethics is (to paraphrase Hegel) ‘to conceive the moral Absolute not only as Substance, but also as Subject’: the ethical subject bears full responsibility for the concrete universal norms he follows — that is to say, the only guarantor of the universality of positive moral norms is the subject’s own contingent act of performatively assuming these norms. (221)
It is therefore Kant’s very ‘formalism’ which opens up the decisive gap in the self-enclosed ethic and/or religious Substance of a particular life-world: I can no longer simply rely on the determinate content provided by the ethical tradition in which I am embeded; this tradition is always already ‘mediated’ by the subject; it ‘remains alive’ only in so far as I effectively assume it. The way to undermine ethical particularism (the notion that a subject can find his or her ethical Substance only in the particular tradition outof which he grew) is thus not via reference to some more universal positive content (like the unfortunate ‘universal values shared by all humanity’), but only by accepting that the ethical Universal is in itself indeterminate, empty, and that it can be translated into a set of positive explicit norms only by means of my active engagement, for which I take full responsibility … thus there is no determinate ethical universality without the contingency of the subject’s act of positing it as such. 221