The Indivisible Remainder (14)

Reason's Condition of Possibility

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. 77-79: Reason's condition of possibility is the condition of its impossibility--or, as Lacan would have put it, 'there's One [y'a de l'Un]': a consistent rational structure has to be anchored to an 'irrational' exception of One which, in its very capacity as an exception, guarantees the structure's consistency. For that reason--and again, everything hinges on this point--'repression' is always double: not only is the Real 'repressed'--mediated, sublated, domesticated--by the Ideal, pressed into the service of the Ideal, but the Ideal Order itself emerges only in so far as its own 'madness'--the violent act of its imposition, or, in Kierkegaardian terms: its own 'becoming'--is 'repressed'. In short, the obscure Ground is not merely the basis, the background, of the Light of Reason, but primarily the dark spot of the very gesture which gives rise to Light as opposed to Darkness. The unconscious act, the decision which breaks up the drives' 'irrational' rotary motion, is itself radically contingent, groundless--in short: 'irrational'.

[....]

So it is not sufficient to assert that Reason is nothing but 'regulated madness': the very gesture of regulating madness is stricto sensu mad. Or--to put it in yet another way: it is not sufficient to assert that Reason discerns islands of Necessity in the sea of Chaos--the very gesture of instituting Necessity is in itself radically contingent.

[....] the vortex of the Real is not the ultimate fact, since it is preceded by the abyss of pure Freedom as the absolute indifference of A and B. Schelling's point is not, therefore, that A is ultimately bound to serve B; rather, it resides in the irreducible gap between pure Freedom ($) and every symbolic scheme of Reason, every determinate symbolic representation of the subject in A, in the ideal medium. The leap from $ (pure Freedom) to A is possible only via a detour through B, in the medium of B; in other words, it is radically contingent: if the subject ($) is to represent-express itself in A, it has to rely on B, on a contracted element which eludes idealization. In Lacanian terms: there is no symbolic representation without fantasy, that is, the subject ($) is constitutively split between S1 and a; it can represent itself in S1, in a signifier, only in so far as the phantasmic consistency of the signifying network is guaranteed by a reference to objet petit a.