Žižek’s Re-inscription of Hegel (2)

From The Metastases of Enjoyment (pp. 188-189)

"One naive yet difficult-to-answer objection to Hegel is : What 'sets in motion' the dialectical process? Why does the 'thesis' not simply persist in its positive self-identity? Why does it dissolve its self-complacent identity, and expose itself to the dangers of negativity and mediation? In short, is not Hegel caught in a vicious circle here; does he not succeed in dissolving every positive identity only because he conceives of it in advance as something mediated by negativity?

What is wrong here is the implicit presupposition of this objection: that there is something akin to the full immediacy of the 'thesis'. Hegel's point, on the contrary, is that there is no 'thesis' (in the sense of the full self-identity and organic unity of a starting point). That is to say: one of the illusions that characterize the standard reading of Hegel concerns the notion that the dialectical process somehow progresses from what is immediately given, from its fullness, to its mediation--say, from the naive, non-reflected consciousness that is aware only of the object opposed to it, to self-consciousness that comprises the awareness of its own activity as opposed to the object.

Hegelian 'reflection', however, does not mean that consciousness is followed by self-consciousness--that at a certain point consciousness magically turns its gaze inward, towards itself, making itself its own object, and thus introduces a reflective distance, a splitting, into the former immediate unity. Hegel's point is, again, that consciousness always-already is self-consciousness: there is no consciousness without a minimal reflective self-relating of the subject. Here Hegel turns against Fichte and Schelling and, in a sense, goes back to Kant, for whom the transcendental apperception of the I is an inherent condition of the I's being conscious of an object.

The passage of consciousness to self-consciousness thus involves a kind of failed encounter: at the very moment when consciousness endeavors to establish itself as 'full' consciousness of its object, when it endeavors to pass from the confused foreboding of its content to its clear representation, it suddenly finds itself within self-consciousness--that is to say, it finds itself compelled to perform an act of reflection, and to take note of its own activity as opposed to the object. Therein resides the paradox of the couple 'in-itself' and 'for-itself': we are dealing here with the passage from 'not yet' to 'always-already'. In 'in-itself', the consciousness (of an object) is not yet fully realized, it remains a confused anticipation of itself; whereas in 'for-itself' consciousness is in a way already passed over, the full comprehension of the object is again blurred by the awareness of the subject's own activity that simultaneously renders possible and prevents access to the object. In short, consciousness is like the tortoise in Lacan's reading of the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise--Achilles can easily outrun the tortoise, yet he cannot catch up with her.

Another way to make the same point is to emphasize that the passage from consciousness to self-consciousness always involves an experience of failure, of impotence--consciousness turns its gaze inside, towards itself, it becomes aware of its own activity, only when the direct, unproblematic grasp of its object fails. Suffice it to recall the process of knowledge: the object's resistance to the grasp of knowledge forces the subject to admit the 'illusory' nature of his knowledge--what he mistook for the object's In-itself are actually his constructions."

The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994)