The Indivisible Remainder (17)

The dialectico-materialist 'and' versus the idealist-ideological 'and'

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

p. 103: What is at stake here could also be formulated as the problem of the status of 'and' as a category. In Althusser, 'and' functions as a precise theoretical category: when an 'and' appears in the title of some of his essays, this little word unmistakably signals the confrontation of some general ideological notion (or, more precisely, of a neutral, ambiguous notion that oscillates between its ideological actuality and its scientific potentiality) with its specification which tells us how we are to concretize this notion so that it begins to function as non-ideological, as a strict theoretical concept. 'And' thus splits up the ambiguous starting unity, introduces into it the difference between ideology and science. [....]

p. 104: 'And' is thus, in a sense, tautological: it conjoins the same content in its two modalities--first in its ideological evidence, then in the extra-ideological conditions of its existence. For that reason, no third term is needed here to designate the medium itself in which the two terms, conjoined by means of the 'and', encounter each other: this third term is already the second term itself which stands for the network (the 'medium') of the concrete existence of an ideological universality. In contrast to this dialectico-materialist 'and', the idealist-ideological 'and' functions precisely as this third term, as the common medium of the polarity or plurality of elements. [....]

pp. 104-105: The difference between these two 'ands'--the 'idealist' one which stands for the medium of the coexistence of the two poles, and the 'materialist' one in which the second term designates the concrete medium of existence of the first (of the ideological universality)--renders Schelling's radical ambiguity clearly perceptible. In a materialist perspective, the 'and' in Schelling's qualification of freedom in its actuality as 'the freedom for good and evil' points toward the uncanny fact that Evil is the concrete existence of the Good. Freedom is not the neutral 'and' between Evil and Good, but, in its concrete existence, the freedom of a living, finite human person, Evil itself, the pure form of Evil--this, perhaps, is what Schelling tried to conceal from himself by taking refuge in suspicious ideological formulas on the 'inversion of the natural relationship'....

p. 105: There, in these two versions of the 'and', resides the ultimate difference between Schelling and Hegel, as well as Schelling's crucial limitation: when Schelling asserts the irrational Ground of Logos as the indelible remainder of the primordial chaotic Thing which forever threatens to draw us back into its whirlpool--'What we call understanding, if it is real, living, active understanding, is really nothing but regulated madness. Understanding can manifest itself, show itself, only in its opposite, thus in what lacks understanding'--he is exposed to the permanent temptation of conceiving Ground and Logos, the Real and the Ideal principle, as complementary.

pp. 105-106: Hegel's effective position is far more disquieting: yes, in 'reconciliation', harmony is restored, but this 'new harmony' has nothing whatsoever to do with the restitution of the lost original harmony--in the new harmony, the loss of the original harmony is consummated. That is to say, the shift from utter 'perversion' to restored harmony concerns principally the notional standards by means of which we measure the 'perversion': it occurs when the subject abandons the (old) standard according to which the new state of things appeared to him 'perverted', and accepts a standard appropriate to the new constellation--as Hegel repeats again and again, when a state of things no longer fits its notion (its normative ground), the endeavor to bring this state of things back into harmony with its notion is vain: one has to change the notion itself.

Schelling claims that the fact of freedom opens up the possibility of Evil as the reversal of the 'normal' relationship between Logos and its contractive Ground: Ground can prevail upon the Light of Reason and, instead of remaining in the (back)ground, directly posit itself as the dominant principle of the Whole. For Hegel, however, this reversal is the very definition of subject: 'subject' is the name for the principle of Selfhood which subordinates to itself the substantial Whole whose particular moment it originally was. The reversal is therefore always-already the reversal of reversal itself: not in the sense that the subject has to abandon his 'egotistic pride', his central position, and again posit himself as the subordinate moment of a higher substantial Whole--what he has to abandon is the very standard of the substantial Whole which reduces him to a subordinated moment; instead, the subject has to raise a new, subjective Totality to the measure of 'normalcy'.