The Indivisible Remainder (27)

From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, by Adrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), pp. 195-6:

In the spirit of the later Schelling (as per the half-told theosophical tale of the Weltalter drafts), Žižek employs a grand metaphor of cosmic proportions to describe what transpires at the smaller scale of ontogenetic subject formation. Bringing this, so to speak, back down to earth, one can read these remarks as condensing a series of concepts and themes already encountered here. Two of these conceptual-thematic threads are especially important: first, the processes of subjectification are set in motion when loopholes or short circuits generated by conflicts within substance prompt or support contractive investments into operators of subjectification; and second, these operators of subjectification, in their function as concrete universals, introduce an asymmetrical ordering of the field of phenomena, an unbalanced new synthesis of reality. And, as Žižek repeatedly emphasizes, this established "new order" of reality always can be destroyed by the subject which created it, since the negativity of $ isn't ever entirely sublated by the subjectifying orders it establishes. (This negativity, as a set of virtual potentialities perpetually ready to break out of Imaginary-Symbolic systems through the events of acts, haunts the actuality of every Imaginary-Symbolic system.)