The Indivisible Remainder (20)

Hegel/Lacan

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. 129-131,

[From the subsection: There is no subject without an empty signifier]

The 'becoming-subject of substance' stands for the gesture of hubris by means of which a mere accident or predicate of the substance, a subordinated moment of its totality, installs itself as the new totalizing principle and subordinates the previous Substance to itself, turning it into its own particular moment. In the passage from feudalism to capitalism, for example, money--in medieval times a clearly subordinated moment of the totality of economic relations, asserts itself as the very principle of totality (since the aim of capitalist production is profit). The 'becoming-subject' of the Substance involves such a continuous displacement of the Centre: again and again, the old Centre turns into a subordinate moment of the new totality dominated by a different structuring principle--far from being a 'deeper' underlying agency which 'pulls the strings' of this displacement of the Centre (i.e. of the structuring principle of totality), 'subject' designates the void which serves as the medium and/or operator of this process of displacement.

We are now in a position to specify the difference between the three parts of Hegel's logic: 'Being', 'Essence', and 'Notion'. In the sphere of Being, we are dealing with immediate, fixed determinations unable to endure any kind of internal dynamics--any contact with their Otherness entails their decomposition, that is to say, each of the determinations of Being simply passes over into another determination. In the sphere of Essence, the dynamics is already located within each determination: the self-identical Essence expresses-reflects itself in the plurality of its appearances. Each essential determination thus already contains its Otherness (there is no Essence which does not appear, no Cause without an effect, etc.); the problem, however, is that this Otherness is reduced to an 'inessential' attribute of a fixed, self-identical Essence unaffected by change--the process of change concerns only the 'inessential' appearances. For that very reason, each essential determination turns into its opposite: the Ground reveals itself as something which depends on what it grounds; [....] the entire content of Essence comes from its 'inessential' appearing; and so on [....]

In other words, dialectics takes its revenge for the assertion of the Essence as the substantial Ground exempted from the process of mediation: the very Otherness which Essence is trying to mediate-internalize as its 'inessential' appearances 'reifies' itself into a kind of counter-image to the immediate self-identity of the Essence, turns into an impenetrable Substance impervious to reflective mediation. [....] We pass into the sphere of Notion the moment we drop this residual self-identical Ground of the process, so that the process effectively becomes a 'process without a substance', the process of the very permanent displacement of every totalizing principle, every 'centre of gravity'--therein resides the notorious 'fluidity' of the Notion.

The trap to be avoided here, therefore, is to conceive Notion as a reflection of Essence which has succeeded: [....] What such a reading of Hegel fails to take into account is the price which has to be paid for this 'transparency': the process becomes 'transparent' at the price of 'transubstantiation'--there is no longer a unique Centre, a central agent which can be said to remain substantially 'the same' in the process of 'externalizing' itself and then reappropriating its Otherness, since in the movement of the 'return-to-itself' the very identity of this 'self' is irreversibly displaced.

We should therefore renounce the usual formulas of the Hegelian 'concrete Universal' as the Universal which is the unity of itself and its Other (the Particular)--that is, not abstractly opposed to the wealth of the particular content, but the very movement of self-mediation and self-sublating of the Particular: the problem with this standard 'organic' image of 'concrete Universal' as a living substantial Totality which reproduces itself through the very movement of its particular content is that in it, the Universal is not yet 'for itself', that is, posited as such. In this precise sense, the emergence of the subject is correlative to the positing of the Universal 'as such', in its opposition to the particular content. [....] And our point is that the emergence of 'subject' is strictly correlative to the positing of this central signifier as 'empty': I become a 'subject' when the universal signifier to which I refer ('ecology', in our case) is no longer experienced as an empty space to be filled out by the particular (feminist, conservative, state, pro-market, socialist...) content. This 'empty' signifier whose positive content is the 'stake' of the ideologico-political struggle 'represents the subject for the other signifiers', for the signifiers which stand for its positive content.