Monday, January 4, 2010

The Indivisible Remainder (28)

From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, by Adrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), p. 200:

When Žižek speaks of the void, what he sometimes has in mind is an intangible web of virtual possibilities (akin to the fleeting and ethereal domain of microscopic quantum events and processes) that becomes a fully constituted reality (i.e., created material nature as per vulgar philosophical conceptions of macroscopic matter) if and when the symmetrical balance of this web is disturbed through one virtual possibility being endowed with greater weight than the others. The virtuality of possibility thereby "collapses" into the reality of actuality. But what prompts the collapse of this intangible virtual web? What catalyzes the falling out of something (i.e., the reality of actuality as substantial being with material heft) from nothing (i.e., the virtuality of possibility as an insubstantiality within substantial being more than substantial being itself)? Here is where things obviously reconnect with the Hegelian topic of the rapport between substance and subject.

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