Žižek’s Re-inscription of Hegel (1)

Žižek’s Hegel is fully aware that various, competing attempts to adequately define any concept are all doomed to fail: any conceptual synthesis is disrupted from within by an indefinable ‘something’ that proves to be essential to the very concept in question. If Žižek’s reading of Hegel strikes you as far-fetched, then remember that Kant already realized that being is not a predicate; that is, that existence cannot be reduced to the conceptual properties of entities. Žižek’s interpretation of German Idealism reveals correspondences not only with Lacanian psychoanalysis, but also with recent Anglo-American philosophy (e.g., the work of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam).

In Reference to Žižek’s For They Know Not What They Do

Žižek’s critique of global liberal capitalism—and its ideological supplement, so-called pluralist “democracy”—hinges on the fact that the possibility of true democracy has long since been foreclosed by global capital. Thus, whereas today’s far Right blatantly violates constitutional law in order to further the interests of an elite few, today’s liberal pseudo-leftists continue to promote identity politics, thereby equating class struggle with any other political struggle. In short, the Left today tacitly assumes that global capitalism is here to stay, in spite of the fact that the upheavals and crises of late capitalism are in the process of making religious fundamentalism and populist nationalism global phenomena.

But against such accommodation with capitalism, Žižek’s For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor opens up the space for an ethical-political act which breaks free from vulgar, egotistic bourgeois life. And in light of the looming ecological catastrophe, the dismantling of the welfare state, and the fact that late capitalism has excluded, disempowered, and disenfranchised more and more workers around the world, Žižek’s message is shifting the very terrain of contemporary political discourse. And his message, in a nutshell, is this: certain kinds of interventions in the symbolic dimension (e.g., in the realm of shared, public practices) can produce changes in the Real. Put simply, this means that in the decisive political act of a revolutionary collective—if we act as if the choice is not forced and choose the impossible—a community of believers in a cause, by acting together, may change the very coordinates of the situation and redefine the parameters of meaning.

On Žižek’s book The Ticklish Subject

The Ticklish Subject is one of Žižek’s most challenging and substantial books; it is a nuanced elaboration of Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian understanding of subjectivity. The book traces through the history of modern philosophy the disavowed truth of subjectivity, or, to put it in extremely simplified terms: the hidden functioning of the unconscious. Žižek brings together--with extraordinary subtlety--Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and a Leftist critique of capitalism. But what, or rather who, is the ticklish subject? Žižek’s answer is that you are. The individual human being, in both its purely personal dimension and its transcendent universality, is the subject under investigation in this text. One of the primary achievements of The Ticklish Subject is to show that even the most intimate personal experience involves a potentially emancipatory universal dimension.

Plato as proto-Hegelian? Troubling Play (SUNY Press, 2005)

Plato's Parmenides shows that very general oppositions transcend definition precisely because they are fundamental to the process of discursive definition itself. The troubling play Parmenides demonstrates for Socrates indicates that these pairs of opposed archai (beginnings, origins) are signposts of the bounds of being. But an archē may not be thought: the fundamental oppositionality with which thought begins may be given various names, but each of these singular terms is defined (ambiguously) in opposition to its other, by way of differences of function within an ideal nexus.

Moreover, the ideal matrices themselves share in this indefinable heterogeneity. The form has singular meaning in dialectical differentiation from more fundamental archai oppositions, in differentiation from other forms, and by contrast with its own various instantiations; for the disclosure of any particular meaning occurs only within the context of human orientations toward entities in the world. The upshot is that a complete matrix of ideas--an ideal whole--cannot be thought, not even by a god. Furthermore, we do not know the archai, but live them; we cannot think fundamental oppositionality, but we cannot think without it.
--Troubling Play: Meaning and Entity in Plato's Parmenides, p. 7

Remarks on Žižek’s book Looking Awry

Fantasy fills out the void or “black hole” of the Real. However, although imaginary projections or constructions may serve as efforts to escape the Real or to avoid the Real of desire, such efforts are doomed from the outset. Žižek shows why by articulating several different modalities of the Lacanian Real. One such modality is the return of the Real. That the Real returns may be seen once we consider how there are certain facts that we really already know, even though we still do not believe them: "The current attitude toward the ecological crisis is a perfect illustration of this split: we are quite aware that it may already be too late, that we are already on the brink of catastrophe (of which the death throes of the European forests are just the harbinger), but nevertheless we do not believe it. We act as though it were only an exaggerated concern over a few trees, a few birds, and not literally a question of our survival."
Slavoj Žižek Looking Awry, pp. 27-8.

Remarks on Lacan and on Žižek’s The Parallax View

Lacan changed the course of psychoanalysis by supplementing Freud’s emphasis on the biological aspect of human existence with inquiries into the symbolic and linguistic character of human interrelations. Lacan showed that because any human subject is split from within by the acquisition of language, the human subject is barred from itself by entry into the symbolic order. As a result, human desire is not simply a function of biology, but is de-centred insofar as it involves imaginative projection—the dimension of fantasy—and the attempt to become whatever it is that the other desires most. As an interpreter of Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, Žižek also engages with theology and political discourses, in order to revive the subversive core of both Christianity and Marxism. He is a leftist and, in addition to Lacan, was strongly influenced by Hegel, Marx, and Freud. The overall strategy of Žižek’s work is to bring together German Idealist philosophy and the most fundamental insights of psychoanalysis.

In The Parallax View, Žižek reads philosophical, scientific, and political theories in light of fundamental Hegelian and Lacanian insights. To put it succinctly, he deploys dialectical thinking and psychoanalytic categories to analyze contemporary culture and to reinvigorate a Marxist critique of capitalist globalism. Žižek discloses the functioning of an irreducible negativity, and shows how the recognition of this gap (for example, between the enunciated content and the act of enunciation) may enable us, on the one hand, to reflectively distance ourselves from the ideological manipulations of late capitalism while, on the other, avoiding the deadlock of a globalized suspicion.

On Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology

A successful ideology allows its adherents to behave as though some irreducibly external and indefinable central term (God, Freedom, New World Order, Democracy) actually names some transcendent thing. The paradox is that although no sublime object is ever ‘there’ in any subject’s experience, nevertheless this indefinable central term is taken by the subject to be that which gives coherence to the entire field of all possible experiences. As a result, although any ideology is inherently incomplete and inconsistent, the very indefinability of the master signifier is tacitly assumed by believers to prove the validity of the system. This implies that any subject’s experience, any social system, and any regime or culture is unified by fantasy projections that are then externalised as unreflective behaviours. Consequently, postmodernist claims that we live in a post-ideological condition are not only false but dangerously misguided. On the contrary – as Žižek’s substantial analyses of contemporary culture demonstrate - if anything, today’s postmodern subjects believe more than ever. In fact, the anti-Enlightenment, Nietzschean tendencies of postmodernism (cynicism, indirections and distantiations, idiosyncratic and mutually exclusive interpretations of the same text) are symptomatic of the contemporary subject’s inability to overcome alienation.