Žižek's Hegelian Version of Lacan

“The basic insight elaborated in the first half of For They Know Not What They Do is that Hegelian dialectics and the Lacanian ‘logic of the signifier’ are two versions of the same matrix.”
--From Žižek's For They Know Not What They Do, second edition (2002), p. xviii.

Žižek develops this insight by locating the accomplishment of German Idealism in its affirmation of subjectivity as the confrontation with negativity. He argues that Hegel’s dialectic is ruptured from within by a surd element that prevents the complete and consistent understanding of any whole or totality. In short, any conceptual unification is disrupted from within by an indefinable void that proves to be essential to the very concept in question.

Žižek shows that consciousness is always linked to a "limit-moment," an experience that things are out of joint, that something has gone wrong. Why is consciousness itself linked to a fundamental disjoint or lack of symmetry? Put simply, Lacan's answer is that the subject is the asymmetry between nature and culture. In other words, the irresolvable negativity or incommensurability revealed by Hegelian dialectics is what Lacan describes as the Real of subjectivity.

Žižek’s aim is to evoke this gap--this irrepressible void at the heart of subjectivity--and, in my view, Žižek delineates this "parallax gap" more clearly than any previous dialectical philosopher (e.g., Plato, Kant, the German Idealists). Moreover, Žižek seems never to lapse into the illusion of completeness or totality that arises from the imaginary register.

Who is a "Pseudo-Leftist"? (Am I?)

Žižek illustrates in several of his books how--in spite of the decline of the paternal metaphor and the inefficacy of ethical/political principles--global capitalist relations of production actually structure an ever more prohibitive social reality. However, this underlying political-economic truth is disavowed both by risk society jargon and by multiculturalist identity politics. Žižek shows that postmodern efforts to reduce truth to "narratives” or “solidarity of beliefs,” as well as our (alleged) multiculturalist tolerance for the other, simply further the interests of global capital.

Žižek contends that today's liberal, pseudo-leftists flatter themselves with the fantasy that they are revolutionary beautiful souls. But what they really want more than anything else is to maintain their comforts and their privileges (comforts and privileges that are bought at the expense of suffering human beings in the Third World). In short, a pseudo-leftist is someone who talks about socialism even while enjoying the benefits and profits that come from the service to capitalism.

On the Lacanian Real

Because of the irresoluble split or antagonism inherent to subjectivity, what we ordinarily consider to be “reality” is in fact a juxtaposition of the symbolic register and the imaginary register. The Lacanian Real, however, is precisely that which is not experienced as part of everyday reality.

The register of the Real involves a dimension of anxiety and loss; the Real disrupts from within all signification through the symbolic and the imaginary registers, and thereby forecloses the possibility of any harmonious synthesis of human existence and human knowledge. The imaginary and the symbolic registers are bound together with the Real like the three loops of a single knot. Consequently, although the Real is that which is in a sense impossible to say (it resists incorporation into shared, symbolic practices and intersubjective linguistic systems), nonetheless—as Žižek shows—what is foreclosed from the symbolic returns in the Real of the symptom.

Moreover, fantasy (like the symptom) serves as a support for the consistency of experience. This means that the register of the imaginary is not simply a realm of illusion, for it is primarily in dreams that we approach the hard kernel of the Real: the Real of our desire announces itself in dreams.

A quote from Žižek's The Parallax View

Žižek's point is not that we need to resolve the separation between knowing and being. The point is to think this gap itself, without introducing any imaginary sense of completeness:

"And of course, the trap to be avoided here is precisely that of trying to formulate the totality parts of which are democratic ideology, the exercise of power, and the process of economic (re)production: if we try to keep them all in view, we end up seeing nothing; the contours disappear."

The Parallax View, p. 56

Karl Marx, from a letter to a friend

"I laugh at the so-called 'practical' men and their wisdom. If one wants to be an ox, one can easily turn one's back on human suffering and look after one's own skin."

Žižek on the Coming Ecological Crisis

The crucial, hitherto underestimated ideological impact of the coming ecological crisis will be precisely to make the “collapse of the big Other” part of our everyday experience, i.e., to sap this unconscious belief in the "big Other" of power: already the Chernobyl catastrophe made ridiculously obsolete such notions as "national sovereignty," exposing the power's ultimate impotence. Our "spontaneous" ideological reaction to it, of course, is to have recourse to the fake premodern forms of reliance on the "big Other" ("New Age consciousness": the balanced circuit of Nature, etc.). Perhaps, however, our very physical survival hinges on our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the “nonexistence of the Other,” of tarrying with the negative.

Žižek, Tarrying With The Negative, p. 237.

On Žižek's unorthodox Marxism

Whereas for Marx the fetishism of commodities conceals the positive network of social relations, for Žižek a fetish conceals the fantasmatic void around which symbolic networks revolve:

"Herein lies the difference with Marxism: in the predominant Marxist perspective the ideological gaze is a partial gaze overlooking the totality of social relations, whereas in the Lacanian perspective ideology rather designates a totality set on effacing the traces of its own impossibility."

Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 49.