Absolute Knowledge

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 357:

In Žižek's reading of Hegel, Absolute Knowledge is not to be understood as any principle of completion or totality: '"Absolute Knowledge" is undeniably not a position of "omniscience", in which, ultimately, the subject "knows everything"' (p. 48). In fact, paradoxically, Absolute Knowledge is the realization of the impossibility of any such neutral position outside of its position of enunciation; and, beyond that, the absence of any similar guarantee in the Other: 'Absolute Knowledge appears to be the Hegelian name for that which Lacan outlined in his description of the passe, the final moment of the analytic process, the experience of lack in the Other' (p. 27). It is ultimately this refusal to take into account the subjective position of enunciation that distinguishes Knowledge from Truth: 'Politically correct proponents of cultural studies often pay for their arrogance and lack of a serious approach by confusing truth (the engaged subjective position) and knowledge, that is, by disavowing the gap that separates them, by directly subordinating knowledge to truth' (p. 92).