Absolute Knowledge

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 357:

In Žižek's reading of Hegel, Absolute Knowledge is not to be understood as any principle of completion or totality: '"Absolute Knowledge" is undeniably not a position of "omniscience", in which, ultimately, the subject "knows everything"' (p. 48). In fact, paradoxically, Absolute Knowledge is the realization of the impossibility of any such neutral position outside of its position of enunciation; and, beyond that, the absence of any similar guarantee in the Other: 'Absolute Knowledge appears to be the Hegelian name for that which Lacan outlined in his description of the passe, the final moment of the analytic process, the experience of lack in the Other' (p. 27). It is ultimately this refusal to take into account the subjective position of enunciation that distinguishes Knowledge from Truth: 'Politically correct proponents of cultural studies often pay for their arrogance and lack of a serious approach by confusing truth (the engaged subjective position) and knowledge, that is, by disavowing the gap that separates them, by directly subordinating knowledge to truth' (p. 92).

Žižek on Hegel

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 365:

Hegel forms a constant reference for Žižek, from his earliest writings to his most recent (if anything, he is becoming even more Hegelian as his work progresses). Žižek's chief insight is that hegel completes the Kantian revolution in philosophy in that he proposes a 'transcendental' explanation for reality but without some cause that simply stands outside of it. For Hegel, reality does not need some exception standing outside of it. Rather, it is already its own exception, its own re-mark: 'A Hegelian corollary to Kant ... is that limitation is to be conceived as prior to what lies "beyond" it, so that it is ultimately Kant himself whose notion of the Thing-in-itself remains too "reified" ... What [Hegel] claims by stating that the Suprasensible is "appearance qua appearance" is precisely that the Thing-in-itself is the limitation of the phenomena as such' (p. 156). Žižek calls this precisely the modernity of Hegel, but we would call it his postmodernity. And indeed in Žižek's surprising comparison of Deleuze with Hegel, it is just this aspect that is emphasized in both: that this 'cause' is not outside of what it explains, that, to paraphrase Deleuze, it belongs to 'pure events-effects devoid of any substantial support' (p. 171). And it is in this sense that we might say that, as against Kant's 'negation' of what is, in Hegel we have a 'negation of negation', the 'negation' even of that negation or exception that remains outside of the positive order. 'This is why the Hegelian "loss of the loss" is definitively not the return to a full identity, lacking nothing: the "loss of the loss" is the moment in which loss ceases the loss of "something" and becomes the opening of the empty place that the object ("something") can occupy (p. 46). And this 'tarrying with the negative' has great consequences for ethics and the political, and marks what truly is at stake in that revolutionary act Žižek can be seen to be arguing for: 'The "negation of negation" is not a kind existential sleight of hand by means of which the subject feigns to put everything at stake, but effectively sacrifices only the inessential. Rather,it stands for the horrifying experience which occurs when, after sacrificing everything considered "inessential," I suddenly perceive that the very essential dimension, for the sake of which I sacrificed the inessential, is already lost' (p. 200).

Exception/Not-All

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 363-4:

These two concepts are usually opposed as respectively the masculine and feminine sides of Lacan's formulae of sexuation: the masculine side consists of a universality made possible by an exception to it; the feminine side does not form such a universality, but there is no exception to it. 'Woman is not-all ... but this means precisely that woman is not-all caught into the phallic function' (p. 67). This masculine logic in fact coincides with that of the master-signifier, in which a certain term (always itself undefined) outside of a series of phenomena explains them and allows them to be exchanged for one another: 'The Master-Signifier ... [is] no longer a simple abbreviation that designates a series of markers but the name of the hidden ground of this series of markers that act as so many expressions-effects of this ground' (p. 186). But as Žižek's work has progressed, he has more and more emphasized the feminine logic of the not-all over this masculine logic of the exception, ultimately understanding it as its real cause. The masculine logic of the exception is an 'exception' within a larger logic of the not-all. For example, of the 'symptom', Žižek writes: 'Symptoms were the series of exceptions, disturbances and malfunctionings ... Later, however, with his notion of the universalized symptom, Lacan accomplished a paradoxical shift ... in which there is no exception to the series of symptoms ... and the symbolic law ... is ultimately just one [of them]' (p. 306). This leads Žižek to consider the Hegelian logic of 'concrete universality', in which it is not that 'the exception grounds the [universal] rule ... [but the] series and [its] exceptions directly coincide' (p. 305). It is a logic that is also to be seen in Žižek's notion of 'love', which renders what is not-all, without nevertheless being an exception to it: 'Even when it is "all" (complete, with no exception), the field of knowledge remains in a way not-all, incomplete. Love is not an exception to the All of knowledge, but rather a "nothing" that renders incomplete even the complete series or field of knowledge' (p. 308).

Enunciated/Enunciation

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 362-3:

Picking up on the Hegelian theme of substance as subject, one of the ways of exposing the artificiality and arbitrariness of the symbolic construction of reality is to locate that place from which it is enunciated. This, of course, has some relation to that traditional demystifying method of posing the question to some abstract conception of justice: Whose justice? Which particular group in society does this conception of justice favour? But it goes beyond this to speak of that necessarily empty place from which all symbolic constructions are spoken: 'It is precisely the password qua empty speech that reduces the subject to the punctuality of the "subject of the enunciation": in it, he is present qua a pure symbolic point freed of all enunciated content...it is only empty speech that, by way of its very emptiness (of its distance from its enunciated content...), creates the space for "full speech"' (p. 142). And it is in this sense that the attempt to think this empty place might be seen as the attempt to think the empty subject (hence the way that Descartes might be understood to mark the beginning of philosophy in its modern, critical sense): 'What if the self is ... the void that is nothing in itself, that has no substantial positive identity, but which nonetheless serves as the unrepresentable point of reference?' (p. 102). And just as philosophy might be defined as the search for this empty position, so it might itself come from this empty position, embody that which has no place within our current situation: 'Cogito is not a substantial entity, but a pure structural function, an empty place ... as such, it can only emerge in the interstices of substantial communal systems' (p. 11).

Drive/Death-Drive

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 361-2:

Žižek takes this term from Freud and uses it to speak of that 'void' which underlies symbolic reality: drive can be understood as the repeated folding back of a process onto itself in order to expose that void for which it stands in. In this regard, it can even be understood as speaking of what makes desire possible: 'The Real qua drive is...the agens, the "driving force," of desiring... [This] in no way implies that the Real of drive is, as to its ontological status, a kind of full substantiality...a drive is not a primordial, positive force but a purely geometrical, topological phenomenon, the name for the curvature of the space of desire' (pp. 192-3). Coming back to the question of the empty place or void that runs throughout Žižek's work, however, this drive as abstract principle is not to be seen outside of the actual objects that stand in for it: 'This "pure life" beyond death, this longing that reaches beyond the circuit of generation and corruption, is it not the product of symbolization, so that symbolization itself engenders the surplus that escapes it?' (p. 160). In this sense, drive is not strictly speaking opposed to desire--as the feminine is not opposed to the masculine--but rather its extension to infinity, so that it applies even to itself. As Žižek says, it is a 'curvature of the space of desire'. Another name for this drive is in fact the subject ($)--and this takes us to the relationship between enunciated and enunciation in Žižek's work: 'The psychoanalytic name for this gap [between cause and effect], of course, is the death drive, while its philosophical name in German Idealism is "abstract negativity", the point of absolute self-contradiction that constitutes the subject as the void of pure self-relating' (p. 106).

Antagonism

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 358:

Throughout his work, Žižek presents the social as inherently split, antagonistic, with no possibility of any final unity or harmony. It is for this reason that the various ideological terms that construct society's image of itself (ecology, feminism, racism, etc.) are always disputed. But beyond any particular definition of these terms--whether left, right or centrist--it is in this dispute itself that the 'truth' of society is to be found: 'In social life, for example, what the multitude of (ideological) symbolizations-narrativizations fails to render is not society's self-identity but the antagonism, the constitutive splitting of the "body politic"' (p. 195). One of the names for this antagonism is class struggle, the ongoing conflict between the workers and those who control the means of production: 'Is the supreme example of such a "Real" not provided by the Marxist concept of class struggle? The consequent thinking through of this concept compels us to admit that there is no class struggle "in reality": "class struggle" designates the very antagonism that prevents the objective (social) reality from constituting itself as a self-enclosed whole' (p. 242). In other words, we might say that class struggle is merely the name for the underlying split between positively constituted ideological entities and the void from which they are enunciated. It is not some external limit or shortcoming that could one day be made up--as even the classical notion of class struggle would seem to promise--but an internal limit that is structurally necessary to the realization of the social itself: 'to grasp the notion of antagonism, in its most radical dimension, we should invert the relationship between the two terms: it is not the external enemy who is preventing from achieving identity with myself, but every identity is already in itself blocked, marked by an impossibility, and the external enemy is simply the small piece, the rest of reality upon which we "project" or "externalize" this intrinsic, immanent impossibility' (p. 252).

Concrete Universality

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 359-360:

Žižek takes up this Hegelian notion, developed at length in his Greater Logic, to speak to that final moment of the dialectic, in which something (Being) coincides with its opposite (Nothing). 'Concrete universality' is thus achieved not when there is one universal for which all others stand in, but--hence the connection with the 'feminine' logic of the not-all--when this universal is only the space that allows the equivalence of all the others, when this universal itself is only one of these others: 'What we have here is thus not a simple reduction of the universal to the particular, but a kind of surplus of the universal. No single universal encompasses the entire particular content, since each particular has its own universal, each contains a specific perspective on the entire field' (p. 69). In this sense, there is no neutral, objective construction of social reality, because any supposed master-signifier or quilting point is itself only one of the elements to be sutured. This relates to Žižek's more general argument, following Adorno and Levi-Strauss, that the definition of society is to be found neither in any of its various descriptions nor in their combination, but in the very split they indicate: 'There is no neutral position, but precisely because there is only one science, and this science is split from within' (p. 77). It is in this sense that Žižek can say that each genus has only two species, the genus itself and that void for which it stands in (p. 326). This is to be seen in the question of sexual difference: there are not two sexes that can be put together, but only one sex (masculine) and that for which it stands in (the feminine), and it is for this reason that sexual difference is one of the ways of properly rendering the 'concrete universality' of the social.