Žižek on Hegel

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 365:

Hegel forms a constant reference for Žižek, from his earliest writings to his most recent (if anything, he is becoming even more Hegelian as his work progresses). Žižek's chief insight is that hegel completes the Kantian revolution in philosophy in that he proposes a 'transcendental' explanation for reality but without some cause that simply stands outside of it. For Hegel, reality does not need some exception standing outside of it. Rather, it is already its own exception, its own re-mark: 'A Hegelian corollary to Kant ... is that limitation is to be conceived as prior to what lies "beyond" it, so that it is ultimately Kant himself whose notion of the Thing-in-itself remains too "reified" ... What [Hegel] claims by stating that the Suprasensible is "appearance qua appearance" is precisely that the Thing-in-itself is the limitation of the phenomena as such' (p. 156). Žižek calls this precisely the modernity of Hegel, but we would call it his postmodernity. And indeed in Žižek's surprising comparison of Deleuze with Hegel, it is just this aspect that is emphasized in both: that this 'cause' is not outside of what it explains, that, to paraphrase Deleuze, it belongs to 'pure events-effects devoid of any substantial support' (p. 171). And it is in this sense that we might say that, as against Kant's 'negation' of what is, in Hegel we have a 'negation of negation', the 'negation' even of that negation or exception that remains outside of the positive order. 'This is why the Hegelian "loss of the loss" is definitively not the return to a full identity, lacking nothing: the "loss of the loss" is the moment in which loss ceases the loss of "something" and becomes the opening of the empty place that the object ("something") can occupy (p. 46). And this 'tarrying with the negative' has great consequences for ethics and the political, and marks what truly is at stake in that revolutionary act Žižek can be seen to be arguing for: 'The "negation of negation" is not a kind existential sleight of hand by means of which the subject feigns to put everything at stake, but effectively sacrifices only the inessential. Rather,it stands for the horrifying experience which occurs when, after sacrificing everything considered "inessential," I suddenly perceive that the very essential dimension, for the sake of which I sacrificed the inessential, is already lost' (p. 200).