The Indivisible Remainder (29)

From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, by Adrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), pp. 200-201:

In Žižek's eyes, there is a Hegelian lesson to Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle. Instead of reading this principle in a Kantian fashion (i.e., the irreducible, unavoidable effect of the observer on the observed establishes a barrier or limit preventing direct observational access to the pure physical Real as it exists unsullied by the interference of observation), Žižek prefers to pull the dialectical trick of transubstantiating an obstacle blocking access to the Thing into the very Thing itself. From this perspective, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle represents (in perhaps a quite loose and metaphorical way) the Hegelian-Žižekian ontological proposition that subject is not separate from substance. Rather, subject is substance staring back at itself; the eye of the observing individual, an eye forming a part of the universe it sees, is, in a certain sense, the universe casting a glance over itself. The subject is that part of substance carrying out the self-objectification of substance, a self-objectification in which substance transforms itself. More specifically, with this example from quantum physics, Žižek contends that subjectivity's effect on the particles it observationally reflects upon isn't a matter of Kantian style external reflection either remaining confined within its own reality apart from material nature of introducing falsifying distortions into the field of Real being. On the contrary, the reflection of subjectivity, rather than being wholly external to what it observes, is inscribed directly into the ontological structure of the Real being of material nature itself. In other words, the refraction of the object by the subject's gaze isn't simply just subjective interference; this refraction is (also) a facet of the object's own essence.