Žižek – Page 24

hegel death drive

LTN 197: Hegel was right to point out again and again that, when one talks, one always dwells in the universal—which means that, with its entry into language, the subject loses its roots in the concrete life-world. To put it in more pathetic terms, the moment I start to talk, I am no longer the sensually-concrete I, since I am caught into an impersonal mechanism which always makes me say something different from what I wanted to say—as the early Lacan liked to say, I am not speaking, I am being spoken by language. This is one of the ways to understand what Lacan called ‘symbolic castration’: the price the subject pays for its ‘transubstantiation’ from the agent of a direct animal vitality to the speaking subject whose identity is kept apart from the direct vitality of passions.

the Servant’s secured particular/finite identity is unsettled when, in experiencing the fear of death during his confrontation with the Master, he gets the whiff of the infinite power of negativity; through this experience, the Servant is forced to accept the worthlessness of his particular Self:

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.6

What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing

How, then, does the truly historical thought break with such universalized ‘mobilism’? In what precise sense is it historical and not simply the rejection of ‘mobilism’ on behalf of some eternal Principles exempted from the flow of generation and corruption?

Here, one should again differentiate historicity proper from organic evolution.

organic evolugion: In the latter, a universal Principle is slowly and gradually differentiating itself; as such, it remains the calm underlying all-encompassing ground that unifies the bustling activity of struggling individuals, their endless process of generation and corruption that is the ‘cycle of life’.

In history proper, on the contrary, the universal Principle is caught into the ‘infinite’ struggle with itself, i.e., the struggle is each time the struggle for the fate of the universality itself. This is why the eminently ‘historical’ moments are those of great collisions when a whole form of life is threatened, when the reference to the established social and cultural norms no longer guarantees the minimum of stability and cohesion; in such open situations, a new form of life has to be invented, and it is at this point that Hegel locates the role of great heroes. They operate in a pre-legal, stateless, zone: their violence is not bound by the usual moral rules, they enforce a new order with the subterranean vitality which shatters all established forms. According to the usual doxa on Hegel, heroes follow their instinctual passions, their true motifs and goals are not clear to themselves, they are unconscious instruments of the deeper historical necessity of giving birth to a new spiritual life form—however, as Lebrun points out, one should not impute to Hegel the standard teleological notion of a hidden Reason which pulls the strings of the historical process, following a plan established in advance and using individuals’ passions as the instruments of its implementation.

First, since the meaning of one’s acts is a priori inaccessible to individuals who accomplish them, heroes included, there is no ‘science of politics’ able to predict the course of events: ‘nobody has ever the right to declare himself depositary of the Spirit’s self-knowledge’17, and this impossibility ‘spares Hegel the fanaticism of ‘objective responsibility’’18 — in other words, here is no place in Hegel for the Marxist-Stalinist figure of the Communist revolutionary who knows the historical necessity and posits himself as the instrument of its implementation. However, it is crucial to add a further twist here: if we merely assert this impossibility, we are still ‘conceiving the Absolute as Substance, not as Subject’— we still surmise that there is some pre-existing Spirit imposing its substantial Necessity on history, we just accept that the insight into this Necessity is inaccessible to us.

From a consequent Hegelian standpoint, one should go a crucial step further and realize that no historical Necessity pre-exists the contingent process of its actualization, i.e., that the historical process is also in itself ‘open’, undecided — this confused mixture ‘generates sense insofar as it unravels itself’:

[…]

LTN 218: This is how one should read Hegel’s thesis that, in the course of the dialectical development, things ‘become what they are’: it is not that a temporal deployment merely actualizes some pre-existing atemporal conceptual structure — this atemporal conceptual structure itself is the result of contingent temporal decisions.

But why shouldn’t we then say that there is simply no atemporal conceptual structure, that all there is is the gradual temporal deployment?

Here we encounter the properly dialectical paradox which defines true historicity as opposed to evolutionist historicism, and which was much later, in French structuralism, formulated as the ‘primacy of synchrony over diachrony’. Usually, this primacy was taken to mean the ultimate denial of historicity in structuralism: a historical development can be reduced to the (imperfect) temporal deployment of a pre-existing atemporal matrix of all possible variations/combinations.

This simplistic notion of the ‘primacy of synchrony over diachrony’ overlooks the (properly dialectical) point, made long ago by (among others) T.S. Eliot in his ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’,on how each truly new artistic phenomenon not only designates a break from the entire past, but retroactively changes this past itself.

At every historical conjuncture, present is not only present, it also encompasses a perspective on the past immanent to it — say, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the October Revolution is no longer the same historical event, i.e., it is (for the triumphant liberal-capitalist view) no longer the beginning of a new progressive epoch in the history of humanity, but the beginning of a catastrophic mis-direction of history which reached its end in 1991.

Or, back to Caesar, once he crossed Rubicon, his previous life appeared in a new way, as a preparation for his later world-historical role, i.e., it was transformed into the part of a totally different lifestory. This is what Hegel calls ‘totality’or what structuralism calls ‘synchronic structure’:

a historical moment which is not limited to the present but includes its own past and future, i.e., the way the past and the future appeared to and from this moment.

Gerard Lebrun whom Ž loves but disagrees with in spots

It is, however, at this very point, after fully conceding Hegel’s radical break with traditional metaphysical theodicy, that Lebrun’s makes his critical move. The fundamental Nietzschean strategy of Lebrun is first to admit the radicality of Hegel’s undermining of the traditional metaphysics, but then, in the crucial second step, to demonstrate how this very radical sacrifice of the metaphysical content saves the minimal form of metaphysics. The accusations which concern Hegel’s theodicy, of course, fall too short: there is no substantial God who writes in advance the script of History and watches over its realization, the situation is open, truth emerges only through the very process of its deployment, etc., etc. — but what Hegel nonetheless maintains is the much deeper presupposition that, at the end, when the dusk falls over the events of the day, the Owl of Minerva will take flight, i.e., that there always is a story to be told at the end, the story which (‘retroactively’ and ‘contingently’as much as one wants) reconstitutes the Sense of the preceding process.

Or, with regard to domination, Hegel is of course against every form of despotic domination, so the critique of his thought as the divinization of the Prussian monarchy is ridiculous; however, his assertion of subjective freedom comes with a catch: it is the freedom of the subject who undergoes a violent ‘transubstantiation’ from the individual stuck onto his particularity to the universal subject who recognizes in the State the substance of his own being. The mirror-obverse of this mortification of individuality as the price to be paid for the rise of the ‘truly’ free universal subject is that the state’s power retains its full authority—what only changes is that this authority (as in the entire tradition from Plato onwards) loses its tyrannical-contingent character and becomes a rationally-justified power.

Is there nonetheless not a grain of truth in Lebrun’s critical point—does Hegel effectively not presuppose that, contingent and open as the history may be, a consistent story can always be told afterwards? Or, to put it in Lacan’s terms, is the entire edifice of the Hegelian historiography not based on the premise that, no matter how confused the events, a subject supposed to know will emerge at the end, magically converting nonsense into sense, chaos into new order?

Recall just his philosophy of history with its narrative of world history as the story of the progress of freedom …. And is it not true that, if there is a lesson of the twentieth century, it is that all the extreme phenomena that took place in it cannot ever be unified in a single encompassing philosophical narrative?

One simply cannot write a ‘phenomenology of the twentieth century Spirit’, uniting technological progress, the rise of democracy, the failed Communist attempt with its Stalinist catastrophe, the horrors of Fascism, the gradual end of colonialism …. But why not? Is it really so?

What if, precisely, one can and should write a Hegelian history of the twentieth century, this ‘age of extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm), as a global narrative delimited by two epochal constellation: the (relatively) long peaceful period of capitalist expansion from 1848 till 1914 as its substantial starting point whose subterranean antagonisms then exploded with the First World War, and the ongoing global-capitalist ‘New World Order’ emerging after 1990 as its conclusion, the return to a new all-encompassing system signaling to some a Hegelian ‘end of history’, but whose antagonisms already announce new explosions?

Are the great reversals and unexpected explosions of the topsy-turvy twentieth century, its numerous ‘coincidences of the opposites’—the reversal of liberal capitalism into Fascism, the even more weird reversal of the October Revolution into the Stalinist nightmare — not the very privileged stuff which seems to call for a Hegelian reading? What would Hegel have made of today’s struggle of Liberalism against fundamentalist Faith? One thing is sure: he would not simply take side of liberalism, but would have insisted on the ‘mediation’of the opposites.

The way one usually reads the Hegelian relationship between necessity and freedom is that they ultimately coincide: for Hegel, true freedom has nothing to do with capricious choices; it means the priority of self-relating to relating-to-other, i.e., an entity is free when it can deploy its immanent potentials without being impeded by any external obstacle. From here, it is easy to develop the standard argument against Hegel: his system is a fully ‘saturated’ set of categories, with no place for contingency and indeterminacy, i.e., in Hegel’s logic, each category follows with inexorable immanent-logical necessity from the preceding one, and the entire series of categories forms a self-enclosed Whole… We can see now what this argument misses: the Hegelian dialectical process is not such a ‘saturated’ self-contained necessary Whole, but the open-contingent process through which such a Whole forms itself. In other words, the reproach confuses being with becoming: it perceives as a fixed order of Being (the network of categories) what is for Hegel the process of Becoming which, retroactively, engenders its necessity.

[…]

This is how one should read Marx’s well-known statement, from his introduction to the Grundrisse manuscripts, about the anatomy of man as a key to the anatomy of ape: it is profoundly materialist, i.e., it does not involve any teleology (man is ‘in germ’ already present in ape, ape immanently tends towards man). It is precisely because the passage from ape to man is radically contingent/imprévisible, because there is no inherent ‘progress’ in it, that one can only retroactively determine/discern the conditions

(not ‘sufficient reasons’) for man in ape. And, again, it is crucial to bear in mind here that the non-All is ontological, not only epistemological: when we stumble upon ‘indeterminacy’ in nature, when the rise of the New cannot be fully accounted for by the set of its preexisting conditions, this does not mean that we encountered the limitation of our knowledge, our inability to understand the ‘higher’ reason at work here, but, on the contrary, that we demonstrated the ability of our mind to grasp the non-All of reality: …

For us Hegelians the crucial question here is: where is Hegel with regard to this distinction between potentiality and virtuality? In a first approach, there is massive evidence that Hegel is the philosopher of potentiality: is not the whole point of the dialectical development as the development from In-itself to For-itself that, in the process of becoming, things merely ‘become what they already are’ (or, rather, were from all eternity)?

Is the dialectical process not the temporal deployment of an eternal set of potentialities, which is why the Hegelian System is a self-enclosed set of necessary passages? However, this mirage of overwhelming evidence dissipates the moment we fully take into account the radical RETROACTIVITY of the dialectical process: the process of becoming is not in itself necessary, but the BECOMING (the gradual contingent emergence) OF NECESSITY ITSELF.

This is (also, among other things) what ‘to conceive substance as subject’ means: subject as the Void, the Nothingness of self-relating negativity, is the very NIHIL out of which every new figure emerges, i.e., every dialectical passage/reversal is a passage in which the new figure emerges ex nihilo and retroactively posits/creates its necessity.

The key question is thus: is the Holy Spirit still a figure of the big Other, or is it possible to conceive it outside this frame? If the dead God were to morph directly into the Holy Ghost, then we would still have the symbolic big Other. But the monstrosity of Christ, this contingent singularity interceding between God and man, is the proof that the Holy Ghost is not the big Other which survives as the spirit of the community after the death of the substantial God, but a collective link of love without any support in the big Other. Therein resides the properly Hegelian paradox of the death of God: if God dies directly, as God, he survives as the virtualized big Other; only if he dies in the guise of Christ, his earthly embodiment, he also disintegrates as the big Other.

Therein resides what Hegel calls the ‘monstrosity’ of Christ: the insertion of Christ between God and man is strictly equivalent to the fact that ‘there is no big Other’—Christ is inserted as the singular contingency on which the universal necessity of the ‘big Other’ itself hinges.

[…]

Christ is such a figure which ‘inserts itself ’ between God and its creation. Natural development is dominated-regulated by a principle, arkhe, which remains the same through the movement of its actualization, be it the development of an organism from its conception to its maturity or the continuity of a species through generation and decay of its individual members—there is no tension here between the universal principle and its exemplification, the universal principle is the calm universal force which totalizes/encompasses the wealth of its particular content; however, ‘life doesn’t have history because it is totalising only externally’—it is a universal genus which encompasses the multitude of individuals who struggle, but this unity is not posited in an individual. In spiritual history, on the contrary, this totalization occurs for itself, it is posited as such in the singular figures which embody universality against its own particular content.

Or, to put it in a different way, in organic life, substance (the universal Life) is the encompassing unity of the interplay of its subordinate moments, that which remains the same through the eternal process of generation and corruption, that which returns to itself through this movement; with subjectivity, however, PREDICATE PASSES INTO SUBJECT: substance doesn’t return to itself, it is re-totalized by what was at the beginning its predicate, its subordinated moment. This is how the key moment in a dialectical process is the ‘transubstantiation’ of its focal point: what was first just a predicate, a subordinate moment of the process (say, money in the development of capitalism), becomes its central moment, retroactively degrading its presuppositions, the elements out of which it emerged, into its subordinate moments, elements of its self-propelling circulation. And this is also how one should approach Hegel’s outrageously ‘speculative’ formulations about Spirit as its own result, a product of itself: while ‘Spirit has its beginnings in nature in general’, the extreme to which spirit tends is its freedom, its infinity, its being in and for itself. These are the two aspects but if we ask what Spirit is, the immediate answer is that it is this motion, this process of proceeding from, of freeing itself from, nature; this is the being, the substance of spirit itself. 31

Spirit is thus radically de-substantialized: Spirit is not a positive counter-force to nature, a different substance which gradually breaks and shines through the inert natural stuff, it is nothing but this process of freeing-itself-from. Hegel directly disowns the notion of Spirit as some kind of positive Agent which underlies the process:

Spirit is usually spoken of as subject, as doing something, and apart from what it does, as this motion, this process, as still something particular, its activity being more or less contingent […] it is of the very nature of spirit to be this absolute liveliness, this process, to proceed forth from naturality, immediacy, to sublate, to quit its naturality, and to come to itself, and to free itself, it being itself only as it comes to itself as such a product of itself; its actuality being merely that it has made itself into what it is.32

If, then, ‘it is only as a result of itself that it is spirit’, this means that the standard talk about the Hegelian Spirit which alienates itself to itself and then recognizes itself in its otherness and thus reappropriates its content, is deeply misleading:

the Self to which spirit returns is produced in the very movement of this return, or, that to which the process of return is returning to is produced by the very process of returning. In a subjective process, there is no ‘absolute subject’, no permanent central agent which plays with itself the game of alienation and disalienation, losing/dispersing itself and then reappropriating its alienated content: after a substantial totality is dispersed, it is another agent — previously its subordinated moment — which re-totalizes it.

It is this shifting of the center of the process from one to another moment which distinguishes a dialectical process from the circular movement of alienation and its overcoming; it is because of this shift that the ‘return to itself ’ coincides with accomplished alienation (when a subject re-totalizes the process, its substantial unity is fully lost). In this precise sense, substance returns to itself as subject, and this trans-substantiation is what substantial life cannot accomplish.

MARX QUOTATION

…in the circulation M-C-M, both the money and the commodity represent only different modes of existence of value itself, the money its general mode, and the commodity its particular, or, so to say, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form to the other without thereby becoming lost, and thus assumes an automatically active character. If now we take in turn each of the two different forms which self-expanding value successively assumes in the course of its life, we then arrive at these two propositions: Capital is money: Capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

Value, therefore, being the active factor in such a process, and assuming at one time the form of money, at another that of commodities, but through all these changes preserving itself and expanding, it requires some independent form, by means of which its identity may at any time be established. And this form it possesses only in the shape of money. It is under the form of money that value begins and ends, and begins again, every act of its own spontaneous generation.

[http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm.]

Žižek’s Commentary:

Note how Hegelian references abound here: with capitalism, value is not a mere abstract ‘mute’ universality, a substantial link between the multiplicity of commodities; from the passive medium of exchange, it turns into the ‘active factor’ of the entire process.

Instead of only passively assuming the two different forms of its actual existence (money—commodity), it appears as the subject ‘endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own’: it differentiates itself from itself, positing its otherness, and then again overcomes this difference—the entire movement is ITS OWN movement. In this precise sense, ‘instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters […] into private relations with itself ’: the ‘truth’ of its relating to its otherness is its self-relating, i.e., in its self-movement, the capital retroactively ‘sublates’ its own material conditions, changing them into subordinate moments of its own ‘spontaneous expansion’—in pure Hegelese, it posits its own presuppositions.

Crucial in the quoted passage is the expression ‘an automatically active character’, an inadequate translation of the German words used by Marx to characterize capital as ‘automatischem Subjekt’, an ‘automatic subject’, the oxymoron uniting living subjectivity and dead automatism. This is what capital is: a subject, but an automatic one, not a living one — and, again, can Hegel think this ‘monstrous mixture’, a process of subjective self-mediation and retroactive positing of presuppositions which as it were gets caught in a substantial ‘spurious infinity’, a subject which itself becomes an alienated substance? (This, perhaps, is also the reason why Marx’s reference to Hegel’s dialectics in his ‘critique of political economy’ is ambiguous, oscillating between taking it as the model for the revolutionary process of emancipation and taking it as the mystified expression of the logic of the Capital.)

DEATH DRIVE

But there is a paradox which complicates this critique of Hegel: is the absolute negativity, this central notion of Hegel’s thought, not precisely a philosophical figure of what Freud called ‘death drive’? Is, then, insofar as—following Lacan—the core of Kant’s thought can be defined as the ‘critique of pure desire’, the passage from Kant to Hegel not precisely the passage from desire to drive? Do the very concluding lines of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (on the Idea which enjoys to repeatedly transverse its circle) not point in this direction? Is the answer to the standard critical question addressed to Hegel—‘But why does dialectical process always go on? Why does dialectical mediation always continue its work?’—not precisely the eppur si muove of pure drive? This structure of negativity also accounts for the quasi-’automatic’ character of the dialectical process—one often reproaches Hegel the ‘mechanical’ character of dialectics: belying all the assurances that dialectics is open to the true life of reality, the dialectical process is like a processing machine which indifferently swallows and processes all possible contents, from nature to history, from politics to art, delivering them packed in the same triadic form ….

The underlying true problem is the following one: the standard ‘Hegelian’ scheme of death (negativity) as the subordinate/mediating moment of Life can only be sustained if we remain within the category of Life whose dialectic is that of the self-mediating Substance returning to itself from its otherness. The moment we effectively pass from Life(-principle) to Death(-principle), there is no encompassing ‘synthesis’, death in its ‘abstract negativity’ forever remains as a threat, an excess which cannot be economized.

In social life, this means that Kant’s universal peace is a vain hope, that war forever remains a threat of total disruption of organized state Life; in individual subjective life, that MADNESS always lurks as a possibility.

Does this mean that we are back at the standard topos of the excess of negativity which cannot be ‘sublated’ in any reconciling ‘synthesis’, or even at the naïve Engelsian view of the alleged contradiction between the openness of Hegel’s ‘method’ and the enforced closure of his ‘system’? There are indications which point in this direction: as was noted by many perspicuous commentators, Hegel’s ‘conservative’ political writings of his last years (like his critique of the English Reform Bill) betray a fear of any further development which will assert the ‘abstract’ freedom of the civil society at the expense of the State’s organic unity, and open up a way to new revolutionary violence. 38 Why did Hegel shirk back here, why did he not dare to follow his basic dialectical rule, courageously embracing ‘abstract’ negativity as the only path to a higher stage of freedom? Furthermore, do Hegel’s clear indications of the historical limitations of his system (things to be discovered in natural sciences; the impossibility of grasping the spiritual essence of countries like North America and Russia which will deploy their potentials only in the next century) not point in the same direction?

Hegel may appear to celebrate the prosaic character of life in a well-organized modern state where the heroic disturbances are overcome in the tranquility of private rights and the security of the satisfaction of needs: private property is guaranteed, sexuality is restricted to marriage, the future is safe …. In this organic order, universality and particular interests appear reconciled: the ‘infinite right’ of subjective singularity is given its due, individuals no longer experience the objective state order as a foreign power intruding onto their rights, they recognize in it the substance and frame of their very freedom. Lebrun asks here the fateful question: ‘Can the sentiment of the Universal be dissociated from this appeasement?’ Against Lebrun, our answer should be:

yes, and this is why war is necessary—in war, universality reasserts its right against and over the concrete-organic appeasement in the prosaic social life. Is thus the necessity of war not the ultimate proof that, for Hegel, every social reconciliation is doomed to fail, that no organic social order can effectively contain the force of abstract-universal negativity? This is why social life is condemned to the ‘spurious infinity’ of the eternal oscillation between stable civic life and wartime perturbations.

master signifier jew

Rex Butler basically from his book Žižek Live Theory of which a portion is available here

But what exactly is wrong with the empirical refutation of anti-Semitism? Why do we have the feeling that it does not effectively oppose its logic, and in a way even repeats it (just as earlier we saw the cultural studies-style rejection of competing interpretations of the shark – ‘It is not really like that!’ – far from breaking our fascination with the shark, in fact continuing or even constituting it)?

Why are we always too late with regard to the master-signifier, only able to play its interpretation against the object or the object against its interpretation, when it is the very circularity between them that we should be trying to grasp?

Undoubtedly, Zizek’s most detailed attempt to describe how the master-signifier works with regard to the Jew is the chapter “Does the Subject Have a Cause?” in Metastases of Enjoyment.

As he outlines it there, in a first moment in the construction of anti-Semitic ideology, a series of markers that apparently speak of certain ‘real’ qualities is seen to designate the Jew, or the Jew appears as a signifier summarizing – Zizek’s term is ‘immediating, abbreviating’ – a cluster of supposedly effective properties. Thus:

(1) (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty . . .) is called Jewish.

Then, in a second moment, we reverse this process and ‘explicate’ the Jew with the same series of qualities. Thus:

(2) X is called Jewish because they are (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty . . .).

Finally, we reverse the order again and posit the Jew as what Zizek calls the ‘reflexive abbreviation’ of the entire series. Thus:

(3) X is (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty . . .) because they are Jewish (ME, 48-9).

In this third and final stage, as Zizek says, Jew ‘explicates’ the very preceding series it ‘immediates’ or ‘abbreviates’. In it, ‘abbreviation and explication dialectically coincide’ (ME, 48).

That is, within the discursive space of anti-Semitism, Jews are not simply Jews because they display that set of qualities (profiteering, plotting . . .) previously attributed to them. Rather, they have this set of qualities because they are Jewish.

What is the difference? As Zizek emphasizes, even though stage (3) appears tautological, or seems merely to confirm the circularity between (1) and (2), this is not true at all. For what is produced by this circularity is a certain supplement ‘X’, what is ‘in Jew more than Jew’: Jew not just as master-signifier but as objet (a).

As Zizek says, with stage (3) we are not just thrown back on to our original starting point, for now Jew is ‘no longer a simple abbreviation that designates a series of markers but the name of the hidden ground of this series of markers that act as so many expression-effects of this ground’ (ME, 49).

Jew is not merely a series of qualities, but what these qualities stand in for.

Jew is no longer a series of differences, but different even from itself.

But, again, what exactly is meant by this?

How is the Jew able to move from a series of specific qualities, no matter how diverse or even contradictory, to a master-signifier covering the entire ideological field without exception?

How is it that we are able to pass, to use an analogy with Marx’s analysis of the commodity form that Zizek often plays on, from an expanded to a ‘general’ or even ‘universal’ form of anti-Semitism (ME, 49)?

The first thing to note here is that stages (1) and (2) are not simply symmetrical opposites.

In (1), corresponding perhaps to that first moment of ideological critique we looked at with Jaws, a number of qualities are attributed to the Jew in an apparently immediate, unreflexive way: (profiteering, plotting . . .) is Jew.

In (2), corresponding to that second moment of ideological critique, these same qualities are then attributed to the Jew in a mediated, reflexive fashion: Jew is (profiteering, plotting . . .). In other words, as with the shark in Jaws, we do not so much speak directly about the Jew, but about others’ attempts to speak of the Jew.

Each description before all else seeks to dispute, displace, contest others’ attempts to speak of the Jew. Each description is revealed as a meta-description, an attempt to say what the Jew and all those others have in common.

Each description in (1) is revealed to be an implicit explication in (2). Each attempts to name that difference – that ‘Jew’ – that is left out by others’ attempts to speak of the Jew. Each attempts to be the master-signifier of the others.

And yet – this is how (3) ‘returns’ us to (1); this is how the Jew is not just a master-signifier but also an objet (a) – to the very extent that the Jew is only the relationship between discourses, what allows us to speak of others’ relationship to the Jew, there is always necessarily another that comes after us that speaks of our relationship to the Jew.

Jew in this sense is that ‘difference’ behind any attempt to speak of difference, that ‘conspiracy’ behind any named conspiracy. That is, each description of the Jew can be understood as the very failure to adopt a meta-position vis-à-vis the Jew.

Each attempt to take up a meta-position in (2) is revealed to be merely another in an endless series of qualities in (1).

That master-signifier in (2) that tries to name what all these different descriptions have in common fails precisely because we can always name another; the series is always open to that difference that allows it to be named.

And ‘Jew’, we might say, is the name for this very difference itself: objet (a)

concrete universal

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

madness 2

This in-between [between nature and culture] is the “repressed” of the narrative form (in this case, of Hegel’s “grand narrative” of the world-historical succession of spiritual forms): not nature as such, but the very break with nature which is (later) supplemented by the virtual universe of narratives.

According to Schelling, prior to its assertion as the medium of the rational Word, the subject is the “infinite lack of being” (unendliche Mangel an Sein), the violent gesture of contraction that negates every being outside itself. This insight also forms the core of Hegel’s notion of madness: when Hegel determines madness to be a withdrawal from the actual world, the closing of the soul onto itself, its “contraction,” he all too quickly conceives of this withdrawal as a “regression” to the level of the “animal soul” still embedded in its natural environment and determined by the rhythm of nature (night and day, etc.).

But does not this withdrawal, on the contrary, amount to a severing of links with the Umwelt, the end of the subject’s immersion in its immediate natural environment, and is it not, as such, the founding gesture of “humanization”? Was not this withdrawal-into-the-self accomplished by Descartes with his universal doubt and reduction to the cogito, which, as Derrida pointed out, also involves a passage through the moment of radical madness? 339

Although Kant famously wrote that man is an animal which needs a master, this should not deceive us: what Kant was aiming at was not the philosophical commonplace according to which, in contrast to animals whose behavioral patterns are grounded in their inherited instincts, man lacks such firm coordinates which, therefore, have to be imposed on him from outside, through a cultural authority; rather, Kant’s true aim is to point out how the very need for an external master is a deceptive lure: man needs a master in order to conceal from himself the deadlock of his own difficult freedom and self-responsibility.

In this precise sense, a truly enlightened “mature” human being is a subject who no longer needs a master, who can fully assume the heavy burden of defining his own limitations. This basic Kantian (and also Hegelian) lesson was put very clearly by Chesterton: “Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice.” 340

Perhaps this Hegelian notion of habit allows us to account for the figure of the zombie, slowly dragging itself around in a catatonic mode but persisting forever: are zombies not figures of pure habit, of habit at its most elementary, prior to the rise of intelligence (language, consciousness, and thinking)? This is why a zombie par excellence is always someone we knew before, when he was still normally alive — the shock for a character in a zombie movie comes when they recognize the formerly friendly neighbor in the creeping figure relentlessly stalking them. What Hegel says about habits thus has to be applied to zombies:

at the most elementary level of human identity, we are all zombies; our “higher” and “free” human activities are dependent on the reliable functioning of our zombie-habits―in this sense, being-a-zombie is a zero-level of humanity, humanity’s inhuman or mechanical core.

The shock of meeting a zombie is thus not the shock of encountering a foreign entity, but the shock of being confronted by the disavowed foundation of our own humanity. 341

madness

This triangle of cogito, religion, and madness is the focus of the polemic between Foucault and Derrida, in which they both share the key underlying premise: that the cogito is inherently related to madness. The difference is that,

for Foucault, the cogito is grounded in the exclusion of madness,

for Derrida, the cogito itself can only emerge through a “mad” hyperbole (universalized doubt), and remains marked by this excess: before it stabilizes itself as res cogitans, the self-transparent thinking substance, the cogito explodes as a crazy punctual excess. 328

Foucault

Foucault’s starting point is a fundamental change in the status of madness which took place in the passage from the Renaissance to the classical Age of Reason (the beginning of the seventeenth century). During the Renaissance (Cervantes, Shakespeare, Erasmus, etc.), madness was a specific phenomenon of the human spirit which belonged to the series of prophets, possessed visionaries, saints, clowns, those obsessed by demons, and so on. It was a meaningful phenomenon with a truth of its own: even if madmen were vilified, they were treated with awe, as if messengers of a sacred horror.

With Descartes, however, madness is excluded; in all its varieties, it comes to occupy a position that was formerly the preserve of leprosy. It is no longer a phenomenon to be interpreted, its meaning searched for, but a simple illness to be treated under the well-regulated laws of a medicine or a science that is already sure of itself, sure that it cannot be mad.

This change concerns not only theory, but social practice itself: from the Classical Age on, madmen were interned, imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals, deprived of the full dignity of a human being, studied and controlled like a natural phenomenon.

Derrida
Through a detailed analysis, he tries to demonstrate that, far from excluding madness, Descartes pushes it to an extreme: universal doubt, where I suspect that the entire world is an illusion, is the greatest madness imaginable. Out of this universal doubt the cogito emerges: even if everything is an illusion, I can still be sure that I think. Madness is thus not excluded by the cogito: it is not that the cogito is not mad, but the cogito is true even if I am totally mad. Extreme doubt, the hypothesis of universal madness, is not external to philosophy, but strictly internal to it, a hyperbolic moment, the moment of madness, which grounds philosophy. Of course, Descartes later “domesticates” this radical excess with his image of man as a thinking substance, dominated by reason; he constructs a philosophy which is clearly historically conditioned. But the excess, the hyperbole of universal madness, is not itself historical; it is the excessive moment which grounds philosophy in all its historical forms. Madness is thus not excluded by philosophy: it is internal to it. Of course, every philosophy tries to control this excess, to repress it―but in repressing it, it represses its own innermost foundation: “Philosophy is perhaps the reassurance given against the anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness.

Žižek
… the true point of “madness,” which is not the pure excess of the “night of the world,” but the madness of the passage to the symbolic itself, of imposing a symbolic order onto the chaos of the Real. If madness is constitutive, then every system of meaning is minimally paranoid, “mad.” Recall again … the lesson of David Lynch’s Straight Story: what is the ridiculously pathetic perversity of figures like Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart or Frank in Blue Velvet compared to deciding to cross the US central plane on a lawnmower to visit a dying relative? Measured against this act, Frank’s and Bobby’s outbreaks of rage are but the impotent theatrics of old and sedate conservatives. In the same way, we should say: what is the mere madness caused by the loss of reason compared to the madness of reason itself?

This dark core of madness at the heart of the cogito can also be determined in a more genetic way…. A naked man is the same nonsense as a shaved ape: without language (and tools and …), man is a crippled animal ― it is this lack which is supplemented by symbolic institutions and tools, … How do we pass from the “natural” to the “symbolic” environment?

This passage is not direct, one cannot account for it within a continuous evolutionary narrative: something has to intervene between the two, a kind of “vanishing mediator,” which is neither Nature nor Culture―this in-between is not the spark of logos magically conferred on homo sapiens, enabling him to form his supplementary virtual symbolic environment, but precisely something which, although it is also no longer nature, is not yet logos, and has to be “repressed” by logos ― the Freudian name for this in-between is, of course, the death drive. 334

Upon a closer look, it becomes evident that, for Kant, discipline and education do not directly work on our animal nature, forging it into human individuality: as Kant points out, animals cannot be properly educated, since their behavior is already predestined by their instincts. What this means is that, paradoxically, in order to be educated into freedom (qua moral autonomy and self-responsibility), I already have to be free in a sense much more radical, “noumenal,” monstrous even. The Freudian name for this monstrous freedom is, again, the death drive.

It is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the “birth of man” are always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man is no longer a mere animal but also not yet a “being of language,” bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly “perverted,” “denaturalized,” “derailed” nature which is not yet culture.

In his anthropological writings, Kant emphasized that the human animal needs disciplinary pressure in order to tame that uncanny “unruliness” which seems to be inherent to human nature―a wild, unconstrained propensity to insist stubbornly on one’s own will, whatever the cost.

It is on account of this that the human animal needs a Master to discipline him: discipline targets this “unruliness,” not the animal nature in man.

In Hegel’s Lectures on Philosophy of History, a similar role is played by the reference to “negroes”: significantly, Hegel deals with “negroes” before history proper (which starts with ancient China), in the section entitled “The Natural Context or the Geographical Basis of World History”: “negroes” here stand for the human spirit in its “state of nature,” they are described as a kind of perverted, monstrous children, simultaneously naïve and corrupted, living in a pre-lapsarian state of innocence, and, precisely as such, the cruelest of barbarians; part of nature and yet thoroughly denaturalized; ruthlessly manipulating nature through primitive sorcery, yet simultaneously terrified by raging natural forces; mindlessly brave cowards. 338-339

change universal term itself so it doesn’t need symptom as its unity

With regard to the opposition of liberal individualism and fundamentalism, today’s communitarians advocate a kind of Jungian “compensation theory”: we in the West put too much emphasis on individualism, neglecting the bonds of community, which then return to haunt us in the guise of the fundamentalist threat; the way to fight fundamentalism is thus to change our own view, to recognize in it the distorted image of the neglected aspect of our own identity. The solution lies in restoring the proper balance between individual and community, creating a social body in which collective and individual freedom organically supplement each other.

What is wrong here is this very figure of a balanced harmony of the two opposed principles. We should start, on the contrary, with the immanent “contradiction” (antagonism) of capitalist individualism―fundamentalism is ultimately a secondary, “reactive” phenomenon, an attempt to counteract and “gentrify” this antagonism.

For Hegel, the goal is thus not to (re)establish the symmetry and balance of the two opposing principles, but to recognize in one pole the symptom of the failure of the other (and not vice versa):

fundamentalism is a symptom of liberalism, Antigone is a symptom of Creon, etc.

The solution is to revolutionize or change the universal term itself (liberalism, etc.), so that it will no longer require its symptom as the guarantee of its unity.

Consequently, the way to overcome the tension between secular individualism and religious fundamentalism is not to find a proper balance between the two, but to abolish or overcome the source of the problem, the antagonism at the very heart of the capitalist individualist project. 303

From the Hegelian standpoint, what is missing here is the properly dialectical paradox of a Nothingness which is prior to Somethingness and, even more, of a weird Something which is less than nothing.

In other words, the Buddhist inter-relation and de-substantialization of reality remains at the level of the thorough interdependence of the opposite poles: no good without evil, no something without nothing, and vice versa―and we can overcome this duality only by way of withdrawing into the abyss of the absolute and unconditional Void.

But what about a properly Hegelian dialectical process in which negativity is not reduced to a self-mediation of the positive Absolute, but in which, on the contrary, positive reality appears as the result of self-relating negativity (or, with regard to ethics, in which the good is a self-negated or self-mediated evil)? 304

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

totality and the Absolute objective spirit

No deduction will bring us from chaos to order; and to locate this moment of the magical turn, this unpredictable reversal of chaos into Order, is the true aim of dialectical analysis. For example, the aim of the analysis of the French Revolution is not to unearth the “historical necessity” of the passage from 1789 to the Jacobin Terror and then to Thermidor and Empire, but rather to reconstruct this succession in terms of a series of (to use this anachronistic term) existential decisions made by agents who, caught up in a whirlwind of action, had to invent a way out of the deadlock (in the same way that Lacan reconceptualizes the succession of oral, anal, and phallic stages as a series of dialectical reversals).

… the Hegelian totality is not merely the totality of the actual content; it includes the immanent possibilities of the existing constellation.

To “grasp a totality” one should include its possibilities; to grasp the truth of what there is, one should include its failure, what might have happened but was missed.

But why should this be the case? Because the Hegelian totality is an “engaged” totality, a totality disclosed to a partial partisan view, not a “neutral” overview transcending engaged positions―as Georg Lukács recognized, such a totality is accessible only from a practical standpoint that considers the possibility of changing it.

As a rule, Hegel’s famous suggestion that one should conceive the Absolute not only as substance but also as subject conjures up the discredited notion of some kind of “absolute Subject,” a mega-Subject creating the universe and keeping watch over our destiny. For Hegel, however, the subject, at its very core, also stands for finitude, the cut, the gap of negativity, which is why God only becomes subject through Incarnation: he is not already in himself, prior to Incarnation, a mega-Subject ruling the universe. Kant and Hegel are usually contrasted along the lines of finite versus infinite: the Hegelian subject as the totalizing and infinite One which mediates all multiplicity; the Kantian subject marked by finitude and the gap that forever separates it from the Thing. But, at a more fundamental level, is not exactly the opposite the case?

The basic function of the Kantian transcendental subject is to continuously enact the transcendental synthesis of apperception, to bring into One the multitude of sensible impressions; while the Hegelian subject is, in its most basic dimension, the agent of splitting, division, negativity, redoubling, the “fall” of Substance into finitude.

Consequently, it is crucial not to confuse Hegel’s “objective spirit” with the Diltheyan notion of a life-form, a concrete historical world, as “objectivized spirit,” the product of a people, its collective genius: the moment we do this, we miss the point of “objective spirit”, which is precisely that

it is spirit in its objective form, experienced by individuals as an external imposition, a constraint even―there is no collective or spiritual super-Subject that would be the author of “objective spirit,” whose “objectivization” this spirit would have been.

In short, for Hegel there is no collective Subject, no Subject-Spirit beyond and above individual humans.

Therein resides the paradox of “objective spirit”: it is independent of individuals, encountered by them as given, pre-existent, as the presupposition of their activity; yet it is nonetheless spirit, that is, something that exists only insofar as individuals relate their activity to it, only as their (pre)supposition. 286

critique of noumena

with his philosophical revolution, Kant made a breakthrough the radicality of which he was himself unaware; so, in a second move, he withdraws from this radicality and desperately tries to navigate into the safe waters of a more traditional ontology. Consequently, in order to pass “from Kant to Hegel,” we have to move not “forward” but backward: back from the deceptive envelope to identify the true radicality of Kant’s breakthrough―in this sense, Hegel was literally “more Kantian than Kant himself.” 208-281

… the limit between phenomena and noumena is not the limit between two positive spheres of objects, since there are only phenomena and their (self-)limitation, their negativity. The moment we get this, the moment we take Kant’s thesis on the negative employment of “noumena” more literally than he did himself, we pass from Kant to Hegel, to Hegelian negativity. 282

This is how one should read the key statement that understanding “limits sensibility by applying the term noumena to things in themselves (things not regarded as appearances). But in so doing it at the same time sets limits to itself, recognizing that it cannot know these noumena through any of the categories.” Our understanding first posits noumena as the external limit of “sensibility” (that is, of the phenomenal world, objects of possible experience): it posits another domain of objects, inaccessible to us.

But in doing so, it “limits itself”: it admits that, since noumena are transcendent, never to be an object of possible experience, it cannot legitimately treat them as positive objects. That is to say, in order to distinguish noumena and phenomena as two positive domains, our understanding would have to adopt the position of a meta-language, exempt from the limitation of phenomena, dwelling somewhere above the division.

Since, however, the subject dwells within phenomena, how can it perceive their limitation (as Wittgenstein also noted, we cannot see the limits of our world from within our world)? The only solution is that the limitation of phenomena is not external but internal, in other words that the field of phenomena is in itself never “all,” complete, a consistent Whole; this self-limitation of phenomena assumes in Kant the form of the antinomies of pure reason.

There is no need for any positive transcendent domain of noumenal entities which limit phenomena from outside ― phenomena with their inconsistencies, their self-limitations, are “all there is.”

The key conclusion to be drawn from this self-limitation of phenomena is that it is strictly correlative to subjectivity: there is a (transcendental) subject only as correlative to the inconsistency, self-limitation, or, more radically, “ontological incompleteness,” of phenomenal reality.

The moment we conceive the inconsistency and self-limitation of phenomenal reality as secondary, as the effect of the subject’s inability to experience the transcendent In-itself the way it “really is,” the subject (as autonomous-spontaneous) becomes a mere epi-phenomenon, its freedom becomes a “mere appearance” conditioned by the fact that noumena are inaccessible to it (to put it in a somewhat simplified way: I experience myself as free insofar as the causality which effectively determines me is inaccessible to me).

In other words, the subject’s freedom can be ontologically grounded only in the ontological incompleteness of reality itself. 283

Noumena designate the In-itself as it appears to us, embedded in phenomenal reality; if we designate our unknowns as “ noumena,” we thereby introduce a gap which is not warranted by their mere unknowability: there is no mysterious gap separating us from the unknown, the unknown is simply unknown, indifferent to being-known. In other words, we should never forget that what we know (as phenomena) is not separated from things-in-themselves by a dividing line, but is constitutive of them: phenomena do not form a special ontological domain, they are simply part of reality. 283

big Other

Does this mean that the ultimate subjective position we can adopt is that of a split which characterizes the fetishistic disavowal? Is it the case that all we can do is take the stance of: “although I know very well that there is no big Other, that the big Other is only the sedimentation, the reified form, of intersubjective interactions, I am compelled to act as if the big Other is an external force which controls us all”? It is here that Lacan’s fundamental insight into how the big Other is “barred,” lacking, in-existent even, acquires its weight: the big Other is not the substantial Ground, it is inconsistent or lacking, its very functioning depends on subjects whose participation in the symbolic process sustains it.

In place of both the submersion of the subject in its substantial Other and the subject’s appropriation of this Other we thus have a mutual implication through lack, through the overlapping of the two lacks, the lack constitutive of the subject and the lack of/in the Other itself.

It is perhaps time to read Hegel’s famous formula “One should grasp the Absolute not only as substance, but also as subject” more cautiously and literally: the point is not that the Absolute is not substance, but subject. The point is hidden in the “not only … but also,” that is, in the interplay between the two, which also opens up the space of freedom ―

we are free because there is a lack in the Other, because the substance out of which we grew and on which we rely is inconsistent, barred, failed, marked by an impossibility.

But what kind of freedom is thereby opened up? Here we should raise a clear and brutal question in all its naïveté: if we reject Marx’s critique and embrace Hegel’s notion of the owl of Minerva which takes flight only at dusk―that is, if we accept Hegel’s claim that the position of an historical agent able to identify its own role in the historical process and to act accordingly is inherently impossible, since such self-referentiality makes it impossible for the agent to factor in the impact of its own intervention, of how this act itself will affect the constellation ― what are the consequences of this position for the act, for emancipatory political interventions?

Does it mean that we are condemned to acting blindly, to taking risky steps into the unknown whose final outcome totally eludes us, to interventions whose meaning we can establish only retroactively, so that, at the moment of the act, all we can do is hope that history will show mercy (grace) and reward our intervention with at least a modicum of success?

But what if, instead of conceiving this impossibility of factoring in the consequences of our acts as a limitation of our freedom, we conceive it as the zero-level (negative) condition of our freedom? 263The personalized notion of God as a wise old man who, sitting somewhere up there in the heavens, rules the world according to his caprice, is nothing but the mystified positive expression of our ignorance―when our knowledge of actual natural causal networks is limited, we as it were fill in the blanks by projecting a supreme Cause onto an unknown highest entity. From the Hegelian view, Spinoza just needs to be taken more literally than he was ready to take himself: what if this lack or incompleteness of the causal network is not only epistemological but also ontological? What if it is not only our knowledge of reality but reality itself which is incomplete?

In this sense Dostoyevsky was right: it is only the personalized God―insofar as he is the name for a desiring/lacking Other, for a gap in the Other―who gives freedom: I am not free by being the creator and master of all reality, when nothing resists my power to appropriate all heterogeneous content; I am free if the substance of my being is not a full causal network, but an ontologically incomplete field. This incompleteness is (or, rather, can also be) signaled by an opaque desiring God, a God who is himself marked by imperfections and finitude, so that when we encounter him, we confront the enigma of “What does he want?” an enigma which holds also for God himself (who does not know what he wants).

But, again, what does this mean for our ability to act, to intervene in history? There are in French two words for the “future” which cannot be adequately rendered in English: futur and avenir. Futur stands for the future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of tendencies which are already present, while avenir points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present ― avenir is what is to come (à venir), not just what will be.

For example, in the contemporary apocalyptic situation, the ultimate horizon of the “future” is what Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls the dystopian “fixed point,” the zero-point of ecological breakdown, global economic and social chaos, etc. ― even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual “attractor” towards which our reality, left to itself, tends.

The way to combat the future catastrophe is through acts which interrupt this drifting towards the dystopian “fixed point,” acts which take upon themselves the risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness “to come.”

We can see here how ambiguous the slogan “no future” is: at a deeper level, it designates not the impossibility of change, but precisely what we should be striving for―to break the hold the catastrophic “future” has over us, and thereby to open up the space for something New “to come.” 264

Žižek Hegel dialectic

There are two ways to break out of this “idealism”: either one rejects Hegel’s dialectics as such, dismissing the notion of the subjective “mediation” of all substantial content as irreducibly “idealist,” proposing to replace it with a radically different matrix (Althusser: structural (over)determination; Deleuze: difference and repetition; Derrida: différance; Adorno: negative dialectics with its “preponderance of the objective”); or one rejects such a reading of Hegel (focused on the idea of “reconciliation” as the subjective appropriation of the alienated substantial content) as “idealist,” as a misreading which remains blind to the true subversive core of Hegel’s dialectic.

This is our position: the Hegel of the absolute Subject swallowing up all objective content is a retroactive fantasy of his critics, starting with late Schelling’s turn to “positive philosophy.” This “positivity” is found also in the young Marx, in the guise of the Aristotelian reassertion of positive forces or potentials of Being pre-existing logical or notional mediation. One should thus question the very image of Hegel-the-absolute-idealist presupposed by his critics — they attack the wrong Hegel, a straw man.

What are they unable to think? The pure processuality of the subject which emerges as “its own result.”

This is why talk about the subject’s “self-alienation” is deceptive, as if the subject somehow precedes its alienation―what this misses is the way the subject emerges through the “self-alienation” of the substance, not of itself. […] 261

What if, in its innermost core, Hegel’s dialectic is not a machine for appropriating or mediating all otherness, for sublating all contingency into a subordinated ideal moment of the notional necessity? What if Hegelian “reconciliation” already is the acceptance of an irreducible contingency at the very heart of notional necessity? What if it involves, as its culminating moment, the setting-free of objectivity in its otherness? 262

In other words, Adorno does not see how what he is looking for (a break-out from the confines of Identity) is already at work at the very heart of the Hegelian dialectic, so that it is Adorno’s very critique which obliterates the subversive core of Hegel’s thought, retroactively cementing the figure of his dialectic as the pan-logicist monster of the all-consuming Absolute Notion. 262