Žižek’s Re-inscription of Hegel (1)

Žižek’s Hegel is fully aware that various, competing attempts to adequately define any concept are all doomed to fail: any conceptual synthesis is disrupted from within by an indefinable ‘something’ that proves to be essential to the very concept in question. If Žižek’s reading of Hegel strikes you as far-fetched, then remember that Kant already realized that being is not a predicate; that is, that existence cannot be reduced to the conceptual properties of entities. Žižek’s interpretation of German Idealism reveals correspondences not only with Lacanian psychoanalysis, but also with recent Anglo-American philosophy (e.g., the work of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam).