Kant

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 368:

The Kantian 'transcendental' critique is absolutely crucial to Žižek, and he draws on it throughout his work. As Žižek writes, summarizing Kant's contribution to the history of philosophy: 'On the one hand, the notion of the transcendental constitution of reality involves the loss of a direct naive empiricist approach to reality; on the other hand, it involves the prohibition of metaphysics, that is, of an all-encompassing worldview providing the noumenal structure of the universe' (p. 101). And yet at the same time Žižek entirely agrees with Hegel's argument that Kant himself misunderstood the nature of his breakthrough, that it is necessary to read Kant against or beyond himself. It is this that Hegel represents for Žižek: not an opposition to Kant or even a simple surpassing of him, but a certain drawing out of consequences that are only implicit in him. As against the distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal in Kant, we can say that the 'shift from Kant to Hegel ... [is] from the tension between immanence and transcendence to the minimal difference/gap in immanence itself ... Hegel is thus not external to Kant: the problem with Kant was that he effected the shift but was not able, for structural reasons, to formulate it explicitly' (p. 218). In this regard, Kant becomes increasingly identified for Žižek with a certain 'masculine' logic of universality and its exception (S1), while Hegel represents a 'feminine' logic of the not-all, in which there is nothing outside of phenomenal appearances but appearance is not all there is, precisely because of its ability to be marked as such ($). Žižek even goes on to compare Kant's noumenal/phenomenal split to Derrida's ethics of 'Otherness' and with Antigone's sacrifice of all things for one thing, as opposed to Hegel's truly modern ethics, in which even this cause itself must be sacrificed.