The Feminine Logic of Non-All

From Sarah Kay's Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 27-28:

Žižek does not deny that Hegel's thought relies on this immanence, but he insists that this immanence results from the dialectical reversal into it of transcendence in the form of negativity. The passage from Kant's transcendental philosophy (which holds that the true nature of a thing forever eludes us) to Hegel's immanentism is effected not by 'filling out the empty place of the Thing ... but by affirming this void as such, in its priority to any positive entity that strives to fill it out' (Tarrying with the Negative, p. 39). That is, absence or negativity are integrated into the fabric of Hegel's thinking in such a way as to leave it flimsy, not wholly consistent, unable to wrap things up. Such thought is what Žižek, following Lacan, calls 'non all'.

The effect of this 'non all' is pervasive. For example, the first section of Hegel's Encyclopedia Logic explores the emergence of being as a correlate of nothing. Being cannot be conceived, says Hegel, except in relation to nothing, and thus nothing is the truth of being. But what does this mean? The very argument which Hegel advances about being attests to the way it is hobbled by the difficulty of accounting for this nothing (Tarrying with the Negative, p. 119). Hegelian reasoning is not a systematic advance towards the capturing of some truth; rather, it is the recording of a series of failures: 'Let us take a moment X: all attempts to grasp its concealed essence, to determine it more concretely, end in failure, and the subsequent moment only positivizes this failure; in it, failure as such assumes positive existence. In short, one fails to determine the truth of X and this failure is the truth of X' (Tarrying with the Negative, p. 119-120). Thus Hegel does not aspire to totality except 'in the negative experience of falsity and breakdown' (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 228). What is complete is so by virtue of being, at the same time, never more than partial.

By describing Hegelian logic as 'non all', Žižek is reading it through a psychoanalytic lens. In particular, he aligns Hegel's thought with Lacan's account of sexual difference, in which 'woman' is 'non all' [...]

Subjective Destitution and the Master

From The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 169-170:  

In one of the recent 'corporate nightmare' thrillers, The Virtual Boss, a company is actually (and unbeknownst to the employees) run by a computer that suddenly 'runs amok', grows beyond control and starts to implement measures against the top managers (it instigates conflicts among them, gives orders for them to be fired, etc.); finally, it sets in motion a deadly plot against its own programmer.... The 'truth' of this plot is that a Master is, in a sense, always virtual--a contingent person who fills out a preordained place in the structure, while the game is actually run by the 'big Other' qua impersonal symbolic machine.  This is what a Master is forced to take note of via the experience of 'subjective destitution':  that he is by definition an imposter, an imbecile who misperceives as the outcome of his decisions what actually ensues from the automatic run of the symbolic machine.

And ultimately, the same holds for every subject:  in his autobiography, Althusser writes that he has been persecuted all his adult life by the notion that he does not exist, by the fear that others will become aware of his non-existence--that is, of the fact that he is an imposter who is only pretending to exist.  His great fear after the publication of Reading Capital, for example, was that some perspicacious critic would reveal the scandalous fact that the main author of this book does not exist....

In a sense, this is what psychoanalysis is about:  the psychoanalytic cure is effectively over when the subject loses this fear and freely assumes his own non-existence.  Thus psychoanalysis is the exact opposite of subjectivist solipsism:  in contrast to the notion that I can be absolutely certain only of the ideas in my own mind, whereas the existence of reality outside myself is already an inconclusive inference, psychoanalysis claims that reality outside myself definitely exists; the problem, rather, is that I myself do not exist....

The Paradox of the Phallic Signifier

From The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso), pp. 130-131:

Therein resides the materialist 'wager' of Deleuze and Lacan: the 'desexualization', the miracle of the advent of the neutral-desexualized surface of Sense-Event, does not rely on the intervention of some transcendent, extra-bodily force; it can be derived from the inherent impasse of the sexualized body itself. In this precise sense--shocking as it may sound to vulgar materialists and obscurantists in their unacknowledged solidarity--the phallus, the phallic element as the signifier of 'castration', is the fundamental category of dialectical materialism. The phallus qua signifier of 'castration' mediates the emrgence of the pure surface of Sense-Event; as such, it is the 'transcendental signifier'--non-sense within the field of Sense, which distributes and regulates the series of Sense. Its 'transcendental' status means that there is nothing 'substantial' about it: the phallus is the semblance par excellence. What the phallus 'causes' is the gap that separates the surface event from bodily density: it is the 'pseudo-cause' that sustains the autonomy of the field of Sense with regard to its true, effective, bodily cause. Here on should recall Adorno's observation on how the notion of transcendental constitution results from a kind of perspective inversion: what the subject (mis)perceives as his constitutive power is actually his impotence, his incapacity to reach beyond the imposed limitations of his horizon--the transcendental constitutive power is a pseudo-power that is the obverse of the subject's blindness as to true bodily causes. Phallus qua cause is the pure semblance of a cause.

The Paradox of Symbolization

From The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso), p. 47:

When I say 'this is an elephant', however, I thereby confer upon an object its symbolic identity; I add to the bundle of real properties a symbolic unifying feature that changes this bundle into One, a self-identical object.  The paradox of symbolization resides in the fact that the object is constituted as One through a feature that is radically external to the object itself, to its reality; through a name that bears no resemblance to the object.

The Paradox of Causality

From The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, p. 39)

The relationship between cause and effect is dialectically reflected here.  On the one hand, the Cause is unambiguously the product of the subject's activity; it is 'alive' only in so far as it is continually resuscitated by the believers' passion.  On the other hand, these same believers experience the Cause as Absolute, as what sets their lives in motion--in short:  as the Cause of their activity; by the same token, they experience themselves as mere transient accidents of their Cause.  Subjects therefore posit the Cause, yet they posit it not as something subordinated to them but as their absolute Cause.  What we encounter here is again the paradoxical temporal loop of the subject:  the Cause is posited, but it is posited as what it 'always-already was'. 

Not Linear Determinism

From The Metastases of Enjoyment, p. 31:

Herein lies the trauma's vicious cycle:  the trauma is the Cause which perturbs the smooth engine of symbolization and throws it off balance; it gives rise to an indelible inconsistency in the symbolic field; but for all that, the trauma has no existence of its own prior to symbolization; it remains an anamorphic entity that gains its consistency only in retrospect, viewed from within the symbolic horizon--it acquires its consistency from the structural necessity of the inconsistency of the symbolic field.  As soon as we obliterate this retrospective character of the trauma and 'substantialize' it into a positive entity, one that can be isolated as a cause preceding its symbolic effects, we regress to common linear determinism. 

Determinism and the Cause

From Žižek's The Metastases of Enjoyment:  On Women and Causality (London:  Verso, p. 30):

The relationship between the cause and the law--the law of causality, of symbolic determination--is therefore an antagonistic one:  'Cause is to be distinguished from that which is determinate in a chain, in other words the law ... there is cause only in something that doesn't work.'  The cause qua the Real intervenes where symbolic determination stumbles, misfires--that is, where a signifier falls out.  For that reason, the Cause qua the Real can never effectuate its causal power in a direct way, as such, but must operate intermediately, under the guise of disturbances within the symbolic order.  Suffice it to recall slips of the tongue when the automaton of the signifying chain is, for a brief moment, disrupted by the intervention of some traumatic memory.  However, the fact that the Real operates and is accessible only through the Symbolic does not authorize us to conceive of it as a factor immanent to the Symbolic:  the Real is precisely that which resists and eludes the grasp of the Symbolic and, consequently, that which is detectable within the Symbolic only under the guise of its disturbances.