Masculine/Feminine

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 370-371:

The Lacanian 'formulae of sexuation' make up a crucial part of Žižek's thinking: one way of characterizing the overall trajectory of his work is as a movement from a masculine logic of the universal and its exception towards a feminine logic of a 'not-all' without exception. However, Žižek does not simply oppose the masculine and the feminine, but rather argues that the masculine is a certain effect of the feminine: 'Man is a reflexive determination of woman's impossibility of achieving an identity with herself (which is why woman is a symptom of man)' (p. 253). That is, everything in Žižek can ultimately be understood in terms of these two formulae. As Žižek asks: 'What if sexual difference is ultimately a kind of zero-institution of the social split of humankind, the naturalized, minimal zero-difference, a split that, prior to signalling any determinate social difference, signals this difference as such? The struggle for hegemony would then, once again, be the struggle for how this zero-difference is overdetermined by other particular social differences.' (p. 311) [....]

Love

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and ScottStephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 370:

Love in the sense Žižek understands it was first developed by Lacan in his Seminar XX. It is thus from the beginning associated with a certain 'feminine' logic of the not-all and implies a way of thinking beyond the master-signifier and its universality guaranteed by exception: 'Lacan's extensive discussion of love in Seminar XX is thus to be read in the Paulinian sense, as opposed to the dialectic of the Law and its transgression. This latter dialectic is clearly "masculine" or phallic ... Love, on the other hand, is "feminine": it involves the paradoxes of the not-All' (p. 309). Žižek associates love with St Paul, and it is a way for him to think the difference between Judaism, whose libidinal economy is still fundamentally that of the law and its transgression, and Christianity, which through forgiveness and the possibility of being born again seeks to overcome this dialectic: 'It is here that one should insist on how Lacan accomplishes the passage from Law to Love, in short, from Judaism to Christianity' (p. 318). In other words, this love might be seen to testify--as we also find with drive and enunciation--to a moment that precedes and makes possible the symbolic order and its social mediation, the way in which things are never directly what they are but only stand in for something else: 'Love bears witness to the abyss of a self-relating gesture by means of which, due to the lack of an independent guarantee of the social pact, the ruler himself has to guarantee the Truth of his word' (p. 245 n. 5).

Claude Levi-Strauss

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 369:

The key example Žižek takes from Levi-Strauss is his famous analysis in Structural Anthropology concerning two different groups from the same tribe, each conceiving of their village in a different way. Žižek's point is that the 'truth' of the village is to be found neither in some reconciliation of the two competing versions nor in some neutral, 'objective' overhead view, but in this very split itself: 'Returning to Levi-Strauss's example of the two drawings of the village, let us note that it is here that we can see in what precise sense the Real intervenes through anamorphosis' (p. 312). This will be related by Žižek to that fundamental 'split' of sexual difference, where again the 'truth' is not to be found in some reconciliation or putting together of a whole, but in the antagonism itself. As he asks: 'How ... are we to understand the "ahistorical" status of sexual difference? Perhaps an analogy to Claude Levi-Strauss's notion of the "zero-institution" might be of some help here' (p. 309). Žižek will use Adorno's analysis of the social in exactly the same sense as that of Levi-Strauss here.

Law

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 369:

Žižek is concerned to show the secret transgression that underpins and makes possible the symbolic law: '"At the beginning" of law, there is a transgression, a certain reality of violence, which coincides with the very act of the establishment of law' (p. 120). Or, as he will say about the seemingly illicit rituals that appear to overturn the law: 'They are a satire on legal institutions, an inversion of public Power, yet they are a transgression that consolidates what it transgresses' (p. 270). But, beyond this, the law itself possesses a certain obscene, unappeasable, superegoic dimension: 'On the one hand, there is Law qua symbolic Ego-Ideal, that is, Law in its pacifying function ... qua the intermediary Third that dissolves the impasse of imaginary aggressivity. On the other hand, there is law in its superego dimension, that is, law qua "irrational" pressure, the force of culpability, totally incommensurable with our actual responsibility' (p. 146). In other words, law itself is its own transgression, and it is just this circularity that Žižek seeks to dissolve or overcome. As he says, repeating at once the problem and the solution: 'The most appropriate form to indicate this curve of the point de capiton, of the "negation of negation," in ordinary language is, paradoxically, that of the tautology: "law is law"' (p. 119).

Antigone/Medea

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 358-9:

These two figures from classical Greek drama are used to illustrate certain conceptions of ethics, and generally Žižek understands both as positive, as breaking with a deconstructive 'respect for the Other' that is ultimately only a way of deferring the (ethical and political) act. 'Such a (mis)reading of Lacan led some German philosophers to interpret Antigone's clinging to her desire as a negative attitude, i.e., as the exemplary case of the lethal obsession with the Thing which cannot achieve sublimation and therefore gets lost in a suicidal abyss' (p. 191). But, in fact, 'what gives Antigone such unshakeable, uncompromising fortitude to persist in her decision is precisely the direct identification of her particular/determinate desire with the Other's (Thing's) injunction/call' (p. 320). Beyond this, Žižek makes a distinction between Antigone and Medea (and Paul Claudel's Sygne de Coufontaine), in that with Antigone there is a particular exception made for which all else is sacrificed (for Žižek a 'masculine' logic of an exception generating a universality), while for Medea even this exception or cause itself must be sacrificed (a feminine logic of a not-all with no exceptions). And for Žižek this is the modern, as opposed to the traditional, form of subjectivity: 'The modern subject constitutes themselves by means of such a gesture of redoubled renunciation, i.e., of sacrificing the very kernel of their being, their particular substance for which they are otherwise ready to sacrifice everything' (p. 205).

Kant

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 368:

The Kantian 'transcendental' critique is absolutely crucial to Žižek, and he draws on it throughout his work. As Žižek writes, summarizing Kant's contribution to the history of philosophy: 'On the one hand, the notion of the transcendental constitution of reality involves the loss of a direct naive empiricist approach to reality; on the other hand, it involves the prohibition of metaphysics, that is, of an all-encompassing worldview providing the noumenal structure of the universe' (p. 101). And yet at the same time Žižek entirely agrees with Hegel's argument that Kant himself misunderstood the nature of his breakthrough, that it is necessary to read Kant against or beyond himself. It is this that Hegel represents for Žižek: not an opposition to Kant or even a simple surpassing of him, but a certain drawing out of consequences that are only implicit in him. As against the distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal in Kant, we can say that the 'shift from Kant to Hegel ... [is] from the tension between immanence and transcendence to the minimal difference/gap in immanence itself ... Hegel is thus not external to Kant: the problem with Kant was that he effected the shift but was not able, for structural reasons, to formulate it explicitly' (p. 218). In this regard, Kant becomes increasingly identified for Žižek with a certain 'masculine' logic of universality and its exception (S1), while Hegel represents a 'feminine' logic of the not-all, in which there is nothing outside of phenomenal appearances but appearance is not all there is, precisely because of its ability to be marked as such ($). Žižek even goes on to compare Kant's noumenal/phenomenal split to Derrida's ethics of 'Otherness' and with Antigone's sacrifice of all things for one thing, as opposed to Hegel's truly modern ethics, in which even this cause itself must be sacrificed.

Kafka

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 367-8:

Žižek often turns to Kafka's The Trial to consider the notion of ideological interpellation: his point is that what Kafka exposes in his parable of the door of the Law is the way that ideological interpellation exists only after it has been taken up. Through a kind of distortion of perspective, what we do not realize is that the Law does not exist until after us--thus both Žižek's notion of love taken from St Paul and diabolical evil taken from Kant are ways of speaking of that 'freedom' or 'guilt' before the law, before the necessity of following the law (even in refusing or transgressing it). It is this 'distance' from the law that at once enables it--'before being caught in identification, in symbolic (mis)recognition, the subject is trapped by the Other through a paradoxical object-cause of desire, in the midst of it, embodying enjoyment ... as exemplified by the position of the man from the country in the famous apologue about the door of the Law in Kafka's The Trial' (p. 255)--and opens up a certain way of thinking what is 'outside' it in the sense of coming 'before' it--'the true conspiracy of Power resides in the very notion of conspiracy, in the notion of some mysterious Agency that "pulls the strings" and effectively runs the show' (p. 230).