concrete universal

Cartesian subject emptied of all symbolic content

Žižek. “How to Begin from the Beginning.” NLR May/June 2009

The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of universality embodied in the excluded.

The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the “part of no part”confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.

152-154 obscene superego supplement

The determination of Judaism as the religion of the Law is to be taken literally: it is the Law at its purest, deprived of its obscene superego supplement.

Recall the traditional obscene figure of the father who officially prohibits his son casual sex, while the message between the lines is to solicit him to engage in sexual conquests — prohibition is here uttered in order to provoke its transgression.

And, with regard to this point, Paul was wrong in his description of the Law as that which solicits its own violation — wrong insofar as he attributed this notion of the Law to Jews: the miracle of the Jewish prohibition is that it effectively is just a prohibition, with no obscene message between the lines. It is precisely because of this that Jews can look for the ways to get what they want while literally obeying the prohibition. Far from displaying their casuistry and externally manipulative relationship to the Law, this procedure rather bears witness to the direct and literal attachment to the Law.

And it is in this sense that the position of the analyst is grounded in Judaism. Recall Henry James’s “The Lesson of the Master,” in which Paul Overt, a young novelist, meets Henry St. George, his great literary master, who advises him to stay single, since a wife is not an inspiration but a hindrance. When Paul asks St. George if there are no women who would “really understand—who can take part in a sacrifice,” the answer he gets is: “How can they take part? They themselves are the sacrifice. They’re the idol and the altar and the flame.” Paul follows St. George’s advice and renounces the young Marian, whom he passionately loves.

However, after returning to London from a trip to Europe, Paul learns that, after the sudden death of his wife, St. George himself is about to marry Marian. After Paul accuses St. George of shameful conduct, the older man says that his advice was right: he will not write again, but Paul will achieve greatness.

Far from displaying cynical wisdom, St. George acts as a true analyst, as the one who is not afraid to profit from his ethical choices, in other words, as the one who is able to break the vicious cycle of ethics and sacrifice.

It is possible to break this vicious cycle precisely insofar as one escapes the hold of the superego injunction to enjoy.

Traditionally, psycho-analysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented him or her the access to “normal” sexual enjoyment. Today, however, when we are bombarded from all sides by the different versions of the superego injunction “Enjoy!”— from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening — one should move to a more radical level: psycho-analysis is today the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy (as opposed to “not allowed to enjoy”). (And, from this vantage point, it becomes retroactively clear how the traditional prohibition to enjoy was sustained by the implicit opposite injunction.) 🙂 See McGowan’s book

This notion of a Law that is not sustained by a superego supplement involves a radically new notion of society — a society no longer grounded in shared common roots:

Every word is an uprooting. The constitution of a real society is an uprooting — the end of an existence in which the “being-at-home” is absolute, and everything comes from within. Paganism is putting down roots. . . . The advent of the scriptures is not the subordination of the spirit to a letter, but the substitution of the letter to the soil. The spirit is free within the letter, and it is enslaved within the root. It is on the arid soil of the desert, where nothing is fixed, that the true spirit descended into a text in order to be universally fulfilled.

Paganism is the local spirit: nationalism in terms of its cruelty and pitilessness. . . . A humanity with roots that possesses God inwardly, with the sap rising from the earth, is a forest or prehuman humanity…. A history in which the idea of a universal God must only be fulfilled requires a beginning. It requires an elite. It is not through pride that Israel feels it has been chosen.

It has not obtained this through grace. Each time the peoples are judged, Israel is judged. . . . It is because the universality of the Divine exists only in the form in which it is fulfilled in the relations between men, and because it must be fulfillment and expansion, that the category of a privileged civilization exists in the economy of Creation. This civilization is defined in terms not of prerogatives, but of responsibilities.

Every person, as a person — that is to say, one conscious of his freedom — is chosen. If being chosen takes on a national appearance, it is because only in this form can a civilization be constituted, be maintained, be transmitted, and endure. (DF,137–138)

Jews are constituted by the lack of land, of territory —however, this lack is reinscribed into an absolute longing (“Next year in Jerusalem!”). What about an unconditional uprooting, renunciation of territory? In other words, does the Jewish identity not involve the paradox of the being-uprooted itself functioning as the foundation of ethnic roots and identity?

Is there not, consequently, the next step to be accomplished, namely, that of forming a collective which no longer relies on an ethnic identity, but is in its very core the collective of a struggling universality?

Levinas is right in locating Jewish universalism in their very nonproselyte stance: Jews do not try to convert all others to Judaism, to impose their particular religious form onto all others; they just stubbornly cling to this form.

The true universalism is thus, paradoxically, this very refusal to impose one’s message on all others — in such a way, the wealth of the particular content in which the universal consists is asserted, while all others are left to be in their particular ways of life.

However, this stance nonetheless involves its own limitation: it reserves for itself a privileged position of a singularity with a direct access to the universal.

All people participate in the universality, but Jews are “more universal than others”: “The Jewish faith involves tolerance because, from the beginning, it bears the entire weight of all other men” (DF,173).

The Jewish man’s burden. . . . In other words, insofar as Jews are absolutely responsible, responsible for all of us, at a meta or reflexive level, are we not all doubly responsible to the Jews? Or, in an inverted way, if they are responsible for all of us, isn’t the way to get rid of our responsibility to annihilate them (those who condense our responsibility)?

What is still missing here is the notion (and practice) of antagonistic universality, of the universality as struggle which cuts across the entire social body, of universality as a partial, engaged position.

The relationship between Judaism as a formal, “spiritual” structure and Jews as its empirical bearers is difficult to conceptualize. The problem is how to avoid the deadlock of the dilemma: either Jews are privileged as an empirical group (which means their spirituality, inaccessible to others, is also ultimately of no relevance to them), or Jews are a contingent bearer of a universal structure.

In this second case, the dangerous conclusion is at hand that, precisely in order to isolate and assert this formal structure, the “principle” of Jewishness, one has to eliminate, erase, the “empirical” Jews. Furthermore, the problem with those who emphasize how Jews are not simply a nation or an ethnic group like others and side by side with others is that, in this very claim, they define Jews in contrast to other “normal” groups, as their constitutive exception.

universal bartleby

Daly, Glyn. “Politics of the political: psychoanalytic theory and the Left(s).” Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2009), 14(3), 279–300

In this sense our autonomy is at once more precarious and more radical. Today we are bombarded with all sorts of choices (consumption, lifestyles, customization of computers, cell-phones, iPods, MySpace, Facebook, etc.) that identify us as ‘free individuals’. Yet we also possess the capacity to refuse the field of choosing and freedom; to reject the very modality of making changes to our lives and to break with the terms and conditions that are implicit in the latter.

Along the lines of the famous monologue from Trainspotting, we are in a position in which we can choose ‘not to choose life’. This involves a more radical ethical freedom in which one can assume a certain position of ‘being impossible’: i.e. a position of refusing the terms of socio-political engagement and identitarian inscription; of refusing the terms of existing possibility.

In other words, what is needed is the development of forms of political subjectivity that do not embrace the conventions and protocol of existing hegemonic engagement.

Both Žižek’s Bartleybyan politics and Badiou’s politics of subtraction—i.e. the effective withdrawal from official political/participatory structures in such a way that it undermines simultaneously their symbolic purchase and constitutive logics—point in a different direction. Thus it is not so much a question of siding with the underdog in the game of existing democracy, but rather rejecting the very terms of the latter. In other words, it involves a critique of how democracy, through its mythologization of the idea that all underdogs are potential winners provided they play the game effectively, can become drawn into, and start to function on behalf of, the dominant politico-economic forces.

Second, and related, the political focus is placed not so much on marginalized groups/identities in general but rather on those whose position (or perhaps, more accurately, lack of position) embody the symptomal truths of our age — i.e. those whose situation appears naturalized as irresolvable, inert and beyond any feasible or direct solution.

These are the displaced and the destitute, the poverty-trapped, the vagrants, homeless and slum-dwellers. They are the radically excluded who are constitutively excessive, who cannot be accommodated and who present a kind of dysfunctional resistance that is nevertheless necessary to the functioning of the whole. They are the nameless ‘unfortunate’ who are passed over, treated with gentrified deliquescence and kept at a non-threatening distance through the ‘ethical’ concerns of charity and aid. What is needed is a politics that strives to overcome this distancing and to confront directly the primordial repressions that are central to the operation of capitalism as a global economic and socio-cultural system.

It is against this background that distinct approaches to the Lacanian traversing the fantasy emerge.

In radical democratic thought, the lesson of the traversal is one that tends to imply that we should assume a proper distancing in order to avoid getting caught up in the ‘cataclysmic desire of fantasy’. The problem therefore is one of adopting the right predisposition: to detach ourselves from objet (a) and to thereby affect a condition where we can ‘really enjoy our partial enjoyment’.

– Radical politics should consequently restrict itself to revolutionary-reform rather than revolution as such. In general, political engagement should not be excessive but should avoid substantial projects of overhaul in favour of the finite, provisional and pragmatic.

– Yet it is precisely in these terms that radical democracy appears to remain stuck in the register of desire: real emancipation is postponed eternally; we should be enthusiastic in the chase but never believe that we hold it in our grasp. This is a politics of desire, of infinite deferral. It becomes effectively ‘a constant search for something else… (with) no specifiable object that is capable of satisfying it’.

– Radical democratic desire, in this sense, is sustained by not having the ‘object’ of democracy. Democracy is always finally elsewhere. In this context, political subjectivity becomes one of establishing a kind of homoeostatic predisposition or proper distancing: one avoids excess in order to avoid disappointment in never attaining the real Thing.

Yet for Žižek traversing the fantasy does not mean to proceed to a non-fantasmatic or even a post-fantasmatic universe defined simply in terms of a containment and/or domestication of excess (this in itself would be something of a fantasy). There is no transcendence of the fantasmatic (the structuring of desire) as such.

Traversal in this sense is the opposite of exorcism. The point is not simply to expel excess but rather to inflect/assume the latter: to take responsibility for the inherency of excess that is integral to human drive.

Traversal, in this sense, puts one in touch with the object of drive — the hole presupposed by all demand and around which Being revolves.

To put it in the terms of Star Wars, the problem is not to bring balance to the force but to recognize that the force itself is the result of a certain (tilted) excess — a Real intervention/structuring — and that it is only through contingence with the latter that alternative possibilities (a different kind of force, or indeed political) can be shown.

The freedom which is gained here, which can be called post-fantasmatic, is thus not one of overcoming alienation but precisely a freedom through alienation in its most radical sense: i.e. the acceptance of the fact that imbalance/excess is our most basic condition towards which we cannot exercise any pre-given partiality or disposition.

Ž’s Lacanian radicalism can be thought of as something that tries to break out of the endless cycle of desire and to move towards a certain logic of love (involving both desire and drive).

While this may sound hopelessly sentimental, we should recall that in Lacan love is distinguished from desire in coming to terms with the non-ideal and the non-all and with accepting precisely the lack in the Other. Love is its own excess, an uncompromising ‘violence’ that goes beyond mere antagonism (i.e. it does not externalize blockage/failure but accepts this as the very condition of being). Through love one finds, and indeed makes, the universal-divine in all its contingent fragility and failing.

Perhaps a more appropriate way of thinking about this shift is in terms of opening the possibility of a politics of excess; a politics that effectively chooses ‘something else’ — i.e. something other than the current mode of choosing.

It refuses to embrace today’s alibis where social ‘problems’ are displaced onto charities, ethical committees, focus groups and all the institutions of political deferral up to and including existing democracy. In this way it places ‘us’ in the scene and refuses not to take responsibility for the contemporary totality and its symptoms. Such a politics is distinguished from radical democratic hegemony in that it does not give up on the real thing or view concrete projects as merely the ersatz fillers of the empty place.

The point is rather to see how this very division between the universal (as empty place) and particular (contingent filler) is inherent to the latter.

In other words, the universal-divine is manifested … through substantial engagement; through finding and making the universal in the particular and through ‘excessive’ commitment, without excuses or dependency on the Other. It is a politics that affirms that the only way out is the way in.

Western and Star Wars

Another example from cinema history is provided by one of its great mysteries: the sudden eclipse of the Western in the mid-1950s. Part of the answer lies in the fact that, at the same moment, space opera emerged as a genre―so one can venture the hypothesis that space opera took the place of the Western in the late 1950s. The dialectical point here is that the Western and space opera are not two subspecies of the genre “adventure.” Rather, we should shift the perspective and start only with the Western―in the course of its development, the Western then encounters a deadlock and, in order to survive, has to “reinvent” itself as space opera ―space opera is thus structurally a subspecies of the Western, in the same way that, for Kieslowski, fiction is a subspecies of documentary.

A and B are not parts (species) of their encompassing universality; A cannot fully become A, actualize its notion, without passing into B, which is formally its subspecies, but a subspecies which undermines the very species under which it is formally subsumed. 363

Every species contains a subspecies which, precisely insofar as it effectively realizes the notion of this species, explodes its frame: the space opera is “a Western at the level of its notion” and, for that very reason, no longer a Western. Instead of a universality subdivided into two species, we thus get a particular species which generates another species as its own subspecies, and

true (“concrete”) universality is nothing but this movement in the course of which a species engenders a subspecies which negates its own species. 364

This is why the idealist approach always demands a multitude of examples ― since no single example really fits, one has to enumerate a great many of them in order to indicate the transcendent wealth of the Idea they exemplify, the Idea being the fixed point of reference for the floating examples.

A materialist, on the contrary, tends to return obsessively to one and the same example: it is the particular example which remains the same in all symbolic universes, while the universal notion it is supposed to exemplify continually changes its shape, so that we get a multitude of universal notions circulating around a single example.

Is this not what Lacan does, returning to the same exemplary cases (the guessing-game with five hats, the dream of Irma’s injection, etc.), each time providing a new interpretation? The materialist example is thus a universal Singular: a singular entity which persists as the universal through the multitude of its interpretations.l

The crucial feature to bear in mind here is how concrete universality is not true concrete universality without including in itself the subjective position of its reader-interpreter as the particular and contingent point from which the universality is perceived. 359

Marx’s example is that of labor: only in capitalism, in which I exchange my labor power for money as the universal commodity, do I relate to my specific profession as one contingent particular form of employment; only here does the abstract notion of work become a social fact, in contrast to medieval societies in which the laborer does not choose his field of work as a profession, since he is directly “born” into it. (The same goes for Freud and his discovery of the universal function of the Oedipus complex.) In other words, the very gap between a universal notion and its particular historical form appears only in a certain historical epoch. What this means is that we truly pass from abstract to concrete universality only when the knowing subject loses its external position and itself becomes caught up in the movement of its content―only in this way does the universality of the object of cognition lose its abstract character and enter into the movement of its particular content. 360

How and under what specific historical conditions does abstract Universality itself become a “fact of (social) life”? Under what conditions do individuals experience themselves as subjects of universal human rights? This is the point of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism: in a society in which commodity exchange predominates, individuals in their daily lives relate to themselves, as well as to the objects they encounter, as contingent embodiments of abstract and universal notions. What I am, in terms of my concrete social or cultural background, is experienced as contingent, since what ultimately defines me is the abstract universal capacity to think and/or to work. Any object that can satisfy my desire is experienced as contingent, since my desire is conceived as an abstract formal capacity, indifferent towards the multitude of particular objects that may satisfy it, but never fully do. 360

The crucial point here is that, again, in the specific social conditions of commodity exchange within a global market economy, “abstraction” becomes a direct feature of actual social life. It has an impact on the way individuals behave and relate to their fate and to their social surroundings.

Marx shares Hegel’s insight into how Universality becomes “for itself” only insofar as individuals no longer fully identify the kernel of their being with their particular social situation: they experience themselves as forever “out of joint” with regard to this situation.

In other words, in a given social structure, Universality becomes “for itself” only in those individuals who lack a proper place in it. The mode of appearance of an abstract Universality, its entering into actual existence, thus produces violence, disrupting the former organic equilibrium. 361

Actual universality is not the “deep” feeling that different cultures ultimately share the same basic values, etc.; actual universality “appears” (actualizes itself) as the experience of negativity, of the inadequacy-to-itself, of a particular identity.

“Concrete universality” does not concern the relationship of a particular to the wider Whole, the way it relates to others and to its context, but rather the way it relates to itself, the way its very particular identity is split from within.

In short, a universality arises “for itself” only through or at the site of a thwarted particularity. Universality inscribes itself into a particular identity as its inability to fully become itself: I am a universal subject insofar as I cannot realize myself in my particular identity―this is why the modern universal subject is by definition “out of joint,” lacking its proper place in the social edifice. 362

property is theft

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s … The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle be removed―say a wealthy uncle―he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them

This provocative analysis demonstrates the limitation of Chesterton, and the inadequacy of his Hegelianism: what he does not grasp is that universal(ized) crime is no longer a crime―it sublates (negates/overcomes) itself as crime and turns from transgression into a new order. He is right to claim that, compared to the “entirely lawless” philosopher, burglars, bigamists, murderers even, are essentially moral: a thief is a “conditionally good man,” he does not deny property as such, he just wants more of it for himself and is then quite ready to respect it.

However, the conclusion to be drawn from this is that crime is as such “essentially moral,” that it desires simply a particular illegal reordering of the global moral order which itself should remain unchanged.

And, in a truly Hegelian spirit, one should take this proposition (of the “essential morality” of the crime) as far as its immanent reversal: not only is crime “essentially moral” (in Hegelese: an inherent moment of the deployment of the inner antagonisms and “contradictions” of the very notion of moral order, not something that disturbs moral order from outside, as an accidental intrusion); but morality itself is essentially criminal―again, not only in the sense that the universal moral order necessarily “negates itself” in particular crimes, but, more radically, in the sense that the way morality (and, in the case of theft, property) asserts itself is already in itself a crime―“property is theft,” as they used to say in the nineteenth century.

That is to say, we should pass from theft as a particular criminal violation of the universal form of property to this form itself as a criminal violation: what Chesterton fails to perceive is that the “universalized crime” he projects onto “lawless modern philosophy” and its political equivalent, the “anarchist” movement that aims at destroying the totality of civilized life, already exists in the guise of the existing rule of the law, so that the antagonism between the law and crime reveals itself to be inherent to crime, as the antagonism between universal and particular crime. 296

True adultery is not copulating outside marriage, but copulating in marriage without love: simple adultery just violates the Law from outside, while marriage without love destroys it from within, turning the letter of the Law against its spirit. So, to paraphrase Brecht once again: what is simple adultery compared to the adultery that is a loveless marriage?

as a properly Hegelian “negation of negation,” which resides in the decisive shift from the distortion of a notion to a distortion constitutive of this notion, that is, to this notion as a distortion-in-itself. Recall again Proudhon’s dialectical motto “property is theft”: the “negation of negation” is here the shift from theft as a distortion (“negation,” violation) of property to the dimension of theft inscribed into the very notion of property (nobody has the right to fully own the means of production; they are by nature inherently collective, so every claim “this is mine” is illegitimate). As we have just seen, the same goes for crime and law, for the passage from crime as the distortion (“negation”) of the law to crime as sustaining the law itself, the idea of the law itself as universalized crime. We should note that, in this notion of the “negation of negation,” the encompassing unity of the two opposed terms is the “lowest,” “transgressive” one: it is not crime which is a moment of law’s self-mediation (or theft which is a moment of property’s self-mediation); the opposition of crime and law is inherent to crime, law is a subspecies of crime, crime’s self-relating negation (in the same way that property is theft’s self-relating negation).

And, ultimately, does not the same go for nature itself? Here, the “negation of negation” is the shift from the idea that we are violating some natural balanced order to the idea that imposing on the Real such a notion of balanced order is in itself the greatest violation―which is why the premise, the first axiom even, of every radical ecology is “there is no Nature.”

first choice has to be wrong choice abstract universality and absolute

One should be very clear here: Hegel in no way subscribes to the standard liberal critique of the French Revolution which locates the wrong turn in 1792–3, whose ideal is 1789 without 1793, the liberal phase without the Jacobin radicalization ― for him 1793–4 is a necessary immanent consequence of 1789; by 1792, there was no possibility of taking a more “moderate” path without undoing the Revolution itself. Only the “abstract” Terror of the French Revolution creates the conditions for post-revolutionary “concrete freedom.”

If one wants to put it in terms of choice, then Hegel here follows a paradoxical axiom which concerns logical temporality: the first choice has to be the wrong choice. Only the wrong choice creates the conditions for the right choice.

Therein resides the temporality of a dialectical process: there is a choice, but in two stages. The first choice is between the “good old” organic order and the violent rupture with that order―and here, one should take the risk of opting for “the worse.” This first choice clears the way for the new beginning and creates the condition for its own overcoming, for only after the radical negativity, the “terror,” of abstract universality has done its work can one choose between this abstract universality and concrete universality. There is no way to obliterate the temporal gap and present the choice as threefold, as the choice between the old organic substantial order, its abstract negation, and a new concrete universality.

It is this paradoxical priority of the wrong choice that provides the key to the Hegelian “reconciliation”: it is not the organicist harmony of a Whole within which every moment sticks to its particular place, as opposed to a field torn apart, in which every moment strives to assert its one-sided autonomy.

Every particular moment does fully assert itself in its one-sided autonomy, but this assertion leads to its ruin, to its self-destruction―and this is the Hegelian “reconciliation”: not a direct reconciliation in mutual recognition, but a reconciliation in and through the struggle itself.

The “harmony” Hegel depicts is the strange harmony of “extremes” themselves, the mad violent dance of every extreme turning into its opposite. Within this mad dance, the Absolute is not the all-encompassing container, the space or field within which particular moments are at war with each other―it is itself caught up in the struggle. 290

my critic misreads my claim that “the ‘transcendent world of formlessness’ (in short: the Absolute) is at war with itself; this means that (self-)destructive formlessness (absolute, self-relating negativity) must appear as such in the realm of finite reality”:

he reads these lines as if I am asserting that the Hegelian Absolute is the abstract negativity of a Universal suspending all its particular content, the proverbial night in which all cows are black, and then triumphantly makes the elementary point that, on the contrary, the Hegelian Absolute is a concrete universal.

But the choice proposed here by my critic―the choice between abstract universality and concrete organic system in which the universal engenders and contains the wealth of its particular determinations―is a false one: what is missing here is the third, properly Hegelian, choice, precisely the one I invoked in the quoted passage, namely

the choice of abstract universality as such, in its opposition to its particular content, appearing within its own particular content (as one of its own species), encountering among its species as its own “oppositional determination.”

It is in this sense that “the ‘transcendent world of formlessness’ (in short: the Absolute) is at war with itself” and that “(self-)destructive formlessness (absolute, self-relating negativity) must appear as such in the realm of finite reality”: this abstract universality becomes “concrete” not only by deploying itself in the series of its particular determinations, but by including itself in this series.

It is because of this self-inclusion (self-referentiality) that the Absolute is “at war with itself,” as in the case of Revolutionary Terror, where abstract negativity is no longer a transcendent In-itself, but appears “in its oppositional determination,” as a particular force opposed to and destroying all (other) particular content.

In more traditional Hegelian terms, this is what it means to say that, in a dialectical process, every external opposition, every struggle between the subject and its external opposite, gives way to an “internal contradiction,” to a struggle of the subject with itself: in its struggle against Faith, Enlightenment is at war with itself, it opposes itself to its own substance. Denying that the Absolute is “at war with itself” means denying the very core of the Hegelian dialectical process, reducing it to a kind of Oriental Absolute, a neutral or impassive medium in which particulars struggle against each other. 291

the Absolute is the “result of itself,” the outcome of its own activity. What this means is that, in the strict sense of the term, there is no Absolute which externalizes or particularizes itself and then unites itself with its alienated Otherness: the Absolute emerges out of this process of alienation; that is, as the result of its own activity, the Absolute “is” nothing but its “return to itself.” The notion of an Absolute which externalizes itself and then reconciles itself with its Otherness presupposes the Absolute as given in advance, prior to the process of its becoming; it posits as the starting point of the process what is effectively its result. 291

God is at war with himself, which is why he has to “enter” the fallen world in the guise of his oppositional determination, as a miserable individual called Jesus? 292

rothenberg Žižek universality

The truth is partial: Imagine a blue light shining from an invisible source on a room full of differently colored materials: the blue light has no visible presence in the air, but a white curtain will appear blue, a red wall will appear purple, and so forth. The same invisible force creates different effects. This is why Žižek can say that every element in the situation (which is itself shaped by some determining but hidden Real) “takes its own side” with respect to it. 162

The retroversion in Badiou’s model concerns the construction of a space and a vocabulary that could make visible what was overlooked in teh original situation — an occulted egalitarian dimension — but this dimension is posited (and glimpsed in the event) rather than achieved. To take an example from Badiou’s own political efforts, the sans-papiers, foreign workers in France, are recognized in the current political situation only as “immigrants,” not as productive workers. The “encyclopedia” of the French (and arguable Western) situation has no term for these people that would bring to light their status as workers, that is, as having the same properties, necessary to France, as any other worker. The specifically political nature of the Badiouan act is a function of working towards realizing this occulted egalitarian dimension, a dimension which we prescribe. Badiou emphasizes repeated that one’s efforts to work to reveal equality should continue regardless of any apparent lack of success. 163

Universality based on the excess generated by the formal negation does not depend upon finding a common ontic property, that is a property which is just one more difference within the situation. All such properties can be used to name differences that are mobilized in the game of hegemony, empty spaces, and master-signifiers, as we have seen in the discussion of Laclau’s political thought. Only the minimal self-difference (described as the radical antagonism cutting across every element) escapes this play of signifiers, existing in an extimate relation to the situation, rather than in its encyclopedia. This self-difference or (self-)antagonism subsists (ex-sists, Lacan would say, to emphasize its extimacy) as the hidden dimension. … Žižek goes on to argue … admonishing Laclau … for ultimately recasting antagonism as agonism, that is, as differences among self-same elements in the social field (Iraq Kettle 90 cited in Rothenberg 164)

Žižek universal singularity

Which is why, from the Lacanian perspective, it is problematic to clam that we humans “seem to have enormous difficulty in accepting our limitedness, our finiteness, and this failure is a cause of much tragedy”: on the contrary, we humans have enormous difficulty in accepting the infinity`(undeadness, excess of life) in the very core of our being, the strange immortality whose Freudian name is the death drive. IDLC 344

… for Lacan, the radically heterogeneous Thing whose traumatic impact decenters the subject is, … the primordial “Evil Thing,” something that cannot ever be sublated (aufgehobun) into a version of the Good; … It is … the very unconditional “fanatical” commitment to a Cause which is the “death drive” at its purest and, as such, the primordial form of Evil: it introduces into the flow of (social) life a violent cut that throws it out of joint. The Good comes afterwards, it is an attempt to “gentrify,” to domesticate, the traumatic impact of the Evil Thing. In short the Good is the screened/domesticated Evil. IDLC 345

… the incompatibility of the Neighbour with the very dimension of universality. What resists universality is the properly inhuman dimension of the Neighbour. This brings us back to the key question: does every universalist ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? The answer is: every ethics that remains “humanist” (in the sense of avoiding the inhuman core of being-human), that disavows the abyssal dimension of the Neighbour. “Man,” “human person,” is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of the Neighbour.

Consequently, when one asserts the Neighbour as the impenetrable “Thing” that eludes any attempt at gentrification, at its transformation into a cozy fellow man, this does not mean that the ultimate horizon of ethics is deference towards this unfathomable Otherness that subverts any encompassing universality.

Following Alain Badiou, one should assert that, on the contrary, only an “inhuman” ethics, an ethics addressing an inhuman subject, not a fellow person, can sustain true universality.

The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasps this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity.

the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular. ID16-17

Rothenberg on universality

Universality based on the excess generated by the formal negation does not depend upon finding a common ontic property, that is a property which is just one more difference within the situation. All such properties can be used to name differences that are mobilized in the game of hegemony, empty spaces, and master-signifiers, as we have see in the discussion of Laclau’s political thought. Only the minimal self–difference (described as the radical antagonism cutting across every element) escapes this play of signifiers, existing in an extimate relation to the situation, rather than in its encyclopedia.[I have no idea what she means ‘encyclopedia’ here, but R. does provide more insight on 168] This self-difference or (self-)antagonism subsists (ex-sists, Lacan would say, to emphasize its extimacy) as the hidden dimension. Accordingly, Žižek goes on to argue for Badiou as the exemplar of the philosopher of extimate causality, while admonishing Laclau … for ultimately recasting antagonism as agonism, that is, as differences among self-same elements in the social field (Rothenberg 164, referring to Žižek Iraq Broken Kettle 90).

rothenberg universal particular

Rothenberg quoting Žižek from Revolution at the Gates: “universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: the universal truth of a concrete situation can be articulated only from a thoroughly partisan position; truth is, by definition, one-sided” (177). Rothenberg then continues “[M]eanings are not at the disposal of the speaker but change with the auditor. If there were such a thing as a universal unaffected by the particular positions from which it is engaged then meanings would be stablized once and for all, and the fulfillment of political promises would be an easy task” (Rothenberg Excessive 161).

Žižek Hegel

Žižek, Slavoj. “Article on Hegel and Interview” The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. eds. Bryant, Levi., and Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. Melbourne: Re.press, 2011. 202-223. 406-415.

It is here that, in order to specify the meaning of materialism, one should apply Lacan’s formulas of sexuation: there is a fundamental difference between the assertion

‘everything is matter’

(which relies on its constitutive exception—in the case of Lenin who, in his Materialism and Empiriocriticism, falls into this trap, the very position of enunciation of the subject whose mind ‘reflects’ matter)

and the assertion ‘there is nothing which is not matter’

(which, with its other side, ‘not-All is matter’, opens up the space for the account of immaterial phenomena).

What this means is that a truly radical materialism is by definition non-reductionist: far from claiming that ‘everything is matter’, it confers upon the ‘immaterial’ phenomena a specific positive non-being.

Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today

For this consciousness was not in peril and fear for this element or that, nor for this or that moment of time, it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign master. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled throughout its every fibre, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. This complete perturbation of its entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability into fluent continuity, is, however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure self-relating existence, which consequently is involved in this type of consciousness. Phen of Spirit

What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing all the wealth of his particular Self? Nothing—in overcoming his particular terrestrial Self, the Servant does not reach a higher level of a spiritual Self; all he has to do is to shift his position and recognize in (what appears to him as) the overwhelming power of destruction which threatens to obliterate his particular identity the absolute negativity which forms the very core of his own Self. In short,

the subject has to fully identify with the force that threatens to wipe him out: what he feared in fearing death was the negative power of his own Self.

There is thus no reversal of negativity into positive greatness — the only ‘greatness’ there is is this negativity itself. Or, with regard to suffering: Hegel’s point is not that the suffering brought about by alienating labour of renunciation is an intermediary moment to pass, so that we should just endure it and patiently wait for the reward at the end of the tunnel—there is no prize or profit to be gained at the end for our patient submission, suffering and renunciation are their own reward,

all that is to be done is to change our subjective position, to renounce our desperate clinging to our finite Self with its ‘pathological’ desires, to purify our Self to universality.

This is also how Hegel explains the overcoming of tyranny in the history of states: ‘One says that tyranny is overturned by the people because it is undignified, shameful, etc. In reality, it disappears simply because it is superfluous’. It becomes superfluous when people no longer need the external force of the tyrant to make them renounce their particular interests, but when they become ‘universal citizens’ by directly identifying the core of their being with this universality — in short, people no longer need the external master when they are educated into doing the job of discipline and subordination themselves. …

Let us take social struggle at its most violent: war. What interests Hegel is not struggle as such, but the way the ‘truth’ of the engaged positions emerges through it, i.e., how the warring parties are ‘reconciled’ through their mutual destruction. The true (spiritual) meaning of war is not honour, victory, defence, etc., but the emergence of absolute negativity (death) as the absolute Master which reminds us of the false stability of our organized finite lives.

War serves to elevate individuals to their ‘truth’ by making them obliterate their particular self-interests and identify with the State’s universality. The true enemy is not the enemy we are fighting but our own finitude

— recall Hegel’s acerbic remark on how it is easy to preach the vanity of our finite terrestrial existence, but much more difficult to accept this lesson when it is enforced by a wild enemy soldier who breaks into our home and starts to cut members of our family with a sabre ….

In philosophical terms, Hegel’s point is here the primacy of ‘self-contradiction’ over external obstacle (or enemy).

We are not finite and self-inconsistent because our activity is always thwarted by external obstacles; we are thwarted by external obstacles because we are finite and inconsistent.

In other words, what the subject engaged in a struggle perceives as the enemy, the external obstacle he has to overcome, is the materialization of the subject’s immanent inconsistency: the fighting subject needs the figure of the enemy to sustain the illusion of his own consistency, his very identity hinges on his opposing the enemy, so that his (eventual) victory over the enemy is his own defeat, disintegration.

As Hegel likes to put it, fighting the external enemy, one (unknowingly) fights one’s own essence.

So, far from celebrating engaged fighting, Hegel’s point is rather that every struggling position, every taking-sides, has to rely on a necessary illusion (the illusion that, once the enemy is annihilated, I will achieve the full realization of my being).

This brings us to what would have been a properly Hegelian notion of ideology: the misapprehension of the condition of possibility (of what is an inherent constituent of your position) as the condition of impossibility (as an obstacle which prevents your full realization) — the ideological subject is unable to grasp how his entire identity hinges on what he perceives as the disturbing obstacle. This notion of ideology is not just an abstract mental exercise: it fits perfectly the Fascist anti-Semitism as the most elementary form of ideology, one is even tempted to say: ideology as such, kat’ exochen. The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, this foreign intruder who disturbs and corrupts the harmony of the social order, is ultimately a fetishist objectivization, a standin, for the ‘inconsistency’ of the social order, for the immanent antagonism (‘class struggle’) which generates the dynamic of the social system’s instability (208).

We can measure here clearly the distance that separates Hegel from Nietzsche: the innocence of exuberant heroism that Nietzsche wants to resuscitate, the passion of risk, of fully engaging in a struggle, of victory or defeat, they are all gone—the ‘truth’ of the struggle only emerges in and through defeat.

This is why the standard Marxist denunciation of the falsity of the Hegelian reconciliation (already made by Schelling) misses the point. According to this critique, the Hegelian reconciliation is false, it occurs only in the Idea, while real antagonisms persist — in the ‘concrete’ experience of the ‘real life’ of individuals who cling to their particular identity, state power remains an external compulsion.

Therein resides the crux of the young Marx’s critique of Hegel’s political thought: Hegel presents the modern constitutional monarchy as a rational State in which antagonisms are reconciled, as an organic Whole in which every constituent (can) find(s) its proper place, but he thereby obfuscates the class antagonism which continues in modern societies, generating the working class as the ‘non-reason of the existing Reason’, as the part of modern society which has no proper part in it, as its ‘part of no-part’ (Rancière). …

In other words, instead of rejecting the Hegelian false reconciliation, one should reject as illusory the very notion of dialectical reconciliation, i.e., one should renounce the demand for a ‘true’ reconciliation. Hegel was fully aware that reconciliation does not alleviate real suffering and antagonisms—his formulas of reconciliation from the foreword to his Philosophy of Right is that one should ‘recognize the Rose in the Cross of the present’, or, to put it in Marx’s terms, in reconciliation, one does not change external reality to fit some Idea, one recognizes this Idea as the inner ‘truth’ of this miserable reality itself. The Marxist reproach that, instead of transforming reality, Hegel only proposes its new interpretation, thus in a way misses the point—it knocks on an open door, since, for Hegel, in order to pass from alienation to reconciliation, one does not have to change reality, but the way we perceive it and relate to it.