Johnston Review of Zizek’s Parallax View diacritics Spring 2007, 37.1: 3–20
substance is subject
material being, as incomplete and inconsistent, contains within itself the potentials for the creative genesis of modes of subjectivity exceeding this same ontological foundation.
Žižek’s dialectical materialism conversely but correlatively proclaims that subject is substance. Žižek declares, “a truly radical materialism is by definition nonreductionist: far from claiming that ‘everything is matter,’ it confers upon ‘immaterial’ phenomena a specific positive nonbeing” [Pv168]. in fact, as can be seen clearly at this juncture, Žižekian materialism is nonreductive in two distinct senses:
- first, it depicts material being as an autorupturing absence of cosmic-organic wholeness prone to produce immanently out of itself precisely those parallax-style splits supporting transontological, more-than-material subjectivities;
- second, these thus-produced subjective structures acquire a being of their own in the form of a certain type of incarnate existence (examples of this special sort of dematerialized matter integral to the constitution of subjectivity include Schelling’s “bodily spirituality”and the strange “materiality” of the signifiers spoken of by Lacan)
Žižek speculatively ponders whether “the emergence of thought is the ultimate Event” [Pv178]. By “Event,” he’s alluding to Alain Badiou’s notion of the evental as distinct from the ontological.
Žižek is suggesting that, like the irruption of the Event out of being, the emergence of the mental (that is, “thought”), although arising from within the neuronal, nonetheless comes to break away from being determined by the electrochemical inner workings of the wrinkled matter of the central nervous system (and, connected with the brain, the evolutionary-genetic factors shaping the human body as a whole).
This is to claim that the mental phenomena of thought achieve a relatively separate existence apart from the material corporeality serving as the thus-exceeded ontological underbelly of these same phenomena. 9
Consciousness is “phenomenal” in contrast to “real” brain processes, but therein lies the true (Hegelian) problem: not how to get from phenomenal experience to reality, but how and why phenomenal experience emerges/explodes in the midst of “blind”/wordless reality. There must be a non-All, a gap, a hole, in reality itself, filled in by phenomenal experience. [Pv197]
In this vein, if one reasonably grants that the brain is, at a minimum, a necessary condition for the mind, one is prompted, as Žižek’s reflections indicate, to wonder
what kind of matter can and does give rise to something that then, once arisen, seems to carve a chasm of inexplicable irreducibility between itself and its originary material ground/source.
Phrased differently, if mind is, at least partially, an effect of brain, what is the ontological nature and status of a cause capable of causing such an effect (that is, an effect appearing to establish an unbridgeable divide between itself and its supposed prior cause)?