The Indivisible Remainder (31)

From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, by Adrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), pp. 202-204:

p. 202: [....] the later Schelling and the "related matter" of quantum physics converge via the subject-as-$ as the negativity of Real being's inner inconsistency (in metaphorical terms borrowed from quantum physics, $ as the "void" of indeterminate and and not yet actualized virtual possibilities) both preceding the advent of fully constituted actual reality and lingering on after this advent as the ineliminable remaining possibilities for negating the actuality of this reality:

"The emergence of human freedom can be accounted for only by the fact that nature itself is not a homogeneous "hard" reality--that is to say, by the presence beneath "hard" reality, of another dimension of potentialities and their fluctuations: it is as if, with human freedom, this uncanny universe of potentialities re-emerges, comes to light." (Indivisible Remainder, p. 230)

[....] subjectification is the process wherein the indeterminacy of the subject-as-$ [....] is collapsed into a certain determinate configuration, a set of specified identificatory coordinates (i.e., particular key images and words as anchors of an identity mirrored back to the subject by select fragments of its surrounding milieu). This movement of subjectification can be treated here as analogous to the quantum dynamic whereby possible virtuality becomes actual reality.

pp. 202-203: For Žižek, subjective freedom amounts to the return of the repressed Hegelian night of the world, the reappearance within reality of the Real foreclosed by reality and its accompanying labors of subjectification. Žižekian freedom is an anonymous autonomy, a faceless power of negativity ready, willing, and able to cancel any and every congealed given within the state of the status quo.

p. 203: [....] the Ideal emerges from the Real, and thereafter the Ideal begins to reshape this same Real.

p. 204: The living matter of the nervous system is simultaneously constituting (i.e., it generates all the mental states of lived experience) and constituted (i.e., these thus-generated mental states reflexively alter this same generative matter)--and the same holds for mind in relation to brain (i.e., the mental states of lived experience are likewise both constituting and constituted). Clearly, the human brain illustrates that natural matter isn't necessarily an inert, solid density operating in a totally determined mechanistic mode. This is why partisans on both sides of stale, standardized variations on the hackneyed disagreements between idealism and materialism tend to ignore the brain's material malleability.