The Indivisible Remainder (10)

Transition from Real to Symbolic

From The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1996 & 2007). The following citations are from the 2007 edition, pp. 43-44:

How, precisely, does the Word discharge the tension of the rotary motion, how does it mediate the antagonism between the contractive and the expansive force? The Word is a contraction in the guise of its very opposite, of an expansion--that is to say, in pronouncing a word, the subject contracts his being outside himself; he 'coagulates' the core of his being in an external sign. In the (verbal) sign, I--as it were--find myself outside myself, I posit my unity outside myself, in a signifier which represents me [....]

This notion of symbolization (of the pronunciation of the Word) as the contraction of the subject outside itself, i.e., in the form of its very opposite (of expansion), announces the structural/differential notion of signifier as an element whose identity stands for its very opposite (for pure difference): we enter the symbolic order the moment a feature functions as the index of its opposite [....] For the very same reason, phallus is for Lacan the 'pure' signifier: it stands for its won opposite, i.e., it functions as the signifier of castration. The transition from the Real to the Symbolic, from the realm of pre-symbolic antagonism (of contraction and expansion) to the symbolic order in which the network of signifiers is correlated to the field of meaning, can only take place by means of a paradoxical 'pure' signifier, a signifier without signified: in order for the field of meaning to emerge, i.e. in order for the series of signifiers to signify something (to have a determinate meaning), there must be a signifier (a 'something') which stands for 'nothing', a signifying element whose very presence stands for the absence of meaning (or, rather, for absence tout court). This 'nothing', of course, is the subject itself, the subject qua $, the empty set, the void which emerges as the result of the contraction in the form of expansion: when I contract myself outside myself, I deprive myself of my substantial content. [....] in the formation of the Word, He articulates outside Himself--He discloses, (sur)renders, this very ideal-spiritual essence of His being. In this precise sense, the formation of the Word is the supreme act and the paradigmatic case of creation: 'creation' means that I reveal, hand over to the Other, the innermost essence of my being.

The problem, of course, is that this second contraction, this original act of creation, this 'drawing together outside itself', is ultimately always ill-fitting, contingent--it 'betrays' the subject, represents him inadequately. here, Schelling already announces the Lacanian problematic of a vel, a forced choice which is constitutive of the emergence of the subject: the subject either persists in himself, in his purity, and thereby loses himself in empty expansion, or he gets out of himself, externalizes himself, by 'contracting' or 'putting on' a signifying feature, and thereby alienates himself--that is, is no longer what he is, the void of pure $ [....]

Therein resides Schelling's reformulation of the classical question 'Why is there something and not nothing?': in the primordial vel, the subject has to decide between 'nothing' (the unground/abyss of freedom that lacks all objective being--in Lacanian mathemes: pure$) and 'something', but always irreducibly in the sense of 'something extra, something additional, something foreign/put on, in a certain respect something contingent'.