The Indivisible Remainder (21)

Using Lacan to reactualize Hegelian dialectic

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. 136-139,

[From the subsection: The semblance of the 'objective Spirit']

The crucial point not to be missed here is that this undecidability , this radical uncertainty, this lack of guarantee concerning the meaning of my partner's words or the rules which regulate his/her use of well-known words ('How can I ever be sure that he means the same thing by me as his word?') is not a deficiency but a positive feature, the ultimate proof of my inclusion in the big Other: the big Other 'functions' as the substance of our being, we are 'within', effectively embedded in it, precisely and only in so far as its status is irreducibly undecidable, lacking any guarantee--any proof of its validity would presuppose a kind of external distance of the subject towards the symbolic order. It was Hegel who pointed out that the spiritual substance is always marked by such a tautological abyss--'it is because it is'.

This notion of the 'virtual' big Other also enables us to approach anew the traditional sociological alternative of methodological individualism, whose basic premiss is the primacy of individuals and which, consequently, insists on the need to derive trans-individual collective entities from the interaction of individuals, from the mutual recognition of their intentions ('common knowledge'), and so on; and, on the other hand, of the Durkheimian presupposition of Society as the substantial Order which is 'always-already here', that is, which precedes individuals and serves as the spiritual foundation of their being, somewhat like the Hegelian 'objective Spirit'. The 'realist' Lacan of the 1950's continues to conceive, in a Durkheimian mode, the big Other as the substantial order which is 'always-already here', providing the unsurpassable horizon of the subjective experience; whereas the late 'fictionalist' Lacan derives the social substance (the big Other) from the interaction of individuals, but with a paradoxical twist which turns upside down the individualist-nominalist reduction of the Substance to 'common knowledge', to the space of mutually recognized subjective intentions. At stake here is nothing less than the enigma of the emergence of the big Other: how is it possible for an individual to perceive his intersubjective environs not as the multitude of others, fellow-creatures like himself, but as a radically asymmetrical field of the 'big Other'? How does he pass from the mirror-like mutual reflection of other individuals ('I think about what he thinks that I think that he thinks, etc.) to 'objective Spirit', to the order of Mores qua impersonal 'reified' Order which cannot be reduced to the simple collection of 'all others'? When, for example, does the social injunction change from '(I'm saying that) you should do this!' to the impersonal 'This is how it is done!'?

What we encounter here is the key Hegelian problem of how we are to think Substance simultaneously as posited by subjects and as an In-itself: how is it possible for individuals to posit their social Substance by means of their social activity, but to posit it precisely as an In-itself, as an independent, presupposed foundation of their activity? From the individualist-nominalist point of view, the big Other emerges as the outcome of the process in the course of which individuals gradually recognize some shared content: [....] this shared content is never fully guaranteed [....]

Lacan's Hegelian solution to this impasse is paradoxical and very refined. [....] his point is not that since one cannot derive spiritual Substance from the interaction of individuals, one has to presuppose it as an In-itself which precedes this interaction. In an (unacknowledged) Hegelian way, Lacan asserts that it is this very impossibility which links an individual to his spiritual substance: the collective substance emerges because individuals can never fully co-ordinate their intentions, become transparent to each other.

This impossibility of co-ordinating intentions, of course, points towards the 'materialist notion of subject' [....] In short, impossibility is primordial, and the spiritual substance is the virtual supplement to this impossibility. [....] (the barrier of impossibility comes first; the Thing is ultimately nothing but the spectre which fills out the void of this impossibility): the big Other is a fiction, a pure presupposition, an unsubstantiated (in all the connotations of the term) hypothesis which fills out the void of the radical uncertainty as to the other's intentions ('Che vuoi?'). [....]