The Indivisible Remainder (25)

'Complementarity' as parallax view

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. 211: The uncertainty principle is actually much 'stronger': far from concerning merely the limitation of the observer, its point is, rather, that complementarity is inscribed into the the 'thing itself'--a particle itself, in its 'reality', cannot have a fully specified mass and momentum, it can have only one or the other. The principle is thus profoundly 'Hegelian': what first appeared to be an epistemological obstacle turns out to be a property of the thing itself; that is to say, the choice between mass and momentum defines the very 'ontological' status of the particle. This inversion of an epistemological obstacle into an ontological 'impediment' which prevents the the object from actualizing the totality of its potential qualities (mass and momentum) is 'Hegelian'.

And this is what 'complementarity' is about: two complementary properties do not complement each other , they are mutually exclusive.

p. 212: On a somewhat different level, this is what Heidegger is aiming at when he insists again and again that true philosophical deliberation is not only 'of no practical use' but can even hurt our 'practical efficiency': a scientist, for example, if he is to be efficient in his particular domain, must not 'think', that is, reflect upon the ontological horizon of pre-comprehension which discloses this domain--therein resides one of the dimensions, an often misrecognized one, of 'ontological difference'.

p. 214: The trap to be avoided here is the reduction of this theme of complementarity to the now-fashionable critique of universalism and the related assertion of the plurality of particular narratives: complementarity--conceived as the impossibility of the complete description of a particular phenomenon--is, on the contrary, the very place of the inscription of universality into the Particular. A particular social phenomenon can never be completely 'contextualized', reduced to a set of sociohistorical circumstances--such a particularization would presuppose the crudest universalism: namely, the presumption that we, its agents, can speak from a neutral-universal place of pure meta-language exempt from any specific context.

Within the social-symbolic field, each particular totality, in its very self-enclosure, (mis)perceives itself as universal, that is to say, it comprises itself and its own perspective on its Outside, on all other particular totalities (epochs, societies, etc.)--why? Precisely because it is in itself incomplete, 'open', not wholly determined by circumstances. It is this very overlapping of two deficiencies (or, in Lacanese: the intersection of the two lacks) that opens up the dimension of universality.

p. 215: We can now see where, precisely, the Hegelian approach to universality differs from the standard one: the standard approach is concerned with the historicist problem of the effective scope of a universal notion (is a notion truly universal, or is its validity actually constrained to a specific historical epoch, social class, etc.?), whereas Hegel asks exactly the opposite question: how, in what precise historical conditions, can a 'neutral' universal notion emerge at all?

p. 216: The properly Hegelian problem is not to ascertain that my particular (socialist, conservative, feminist...) brand of ecological orientation is just one species of the universal genus of ecological movements; the true problem is how, under what conditions, my own particular sociopolitical experience leads me to abandon the immediate identification of 'being an ecologist' with my particular brand of it, so that I apprehend the link that connects ecology in general with my particular orientation as contingent. The answer, of course, is provided by the notion of lack: only in so far as I experience my own particular position as fundamentally deficient does the universal dimension involved in (and obfuscated by) it appear as such--or, in Hegel's terms, it is 'posited' becomes 'for itself'.

p. 217: Along the same lines, one can also clarify the allegedly 'unhistorical' character of the Lacanian 'formulas of sexuation'. Every epoch, every society, every ethnic community, of course, furnishes its own ideological connotation of the difference between the sexes (in Europe, for example, 'man' is posited as the neutral universality of the human species, whereas 'woman' stands for the specific difference, i.e. for 'sexualization' as such; in Ancient China, on the contrary, 'woman' designated continuity and 'man' discontinuity, breach, separation). What the Lacanian 'formulas of sexuation' endeavor to formulate, however, is not yet another positive formulation of the sexual difference but the underlying impasse that generates the multitude of positive formulations as so many (failed) attempts to symbolize the traumatic real of the sexual difference. What all epochs have in common is not some universal positive feature, some transhistorical constant; what they all share, rather, is the same deadlock, the same antinomy--in Schelling's terms, one is tempted to say that this same impasse persists and repeats itself in different powers/potentials in different cultures.