The Indivisible Remainder (4)

On Freedom, Time, and the Unconscious

From The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1996 & 2007). The following citations are from the 2007 edition.

p. 16: The whole world is thoroughly caught in reason, but the question is : how did it get caught in the network of reason in the first place? Here Schelling inverts the standard perspective : the problem is not how, in an universe regulated by inexorable natural laws, freedom is possible--that is, where, in the determinist universe, there is a place for freedom which would not be a mere illusion based on our ignorance of the true causes--but, rather, how the world as a rational totality of causal interconnections made its appearance in the first place." [....] "For Schelling, then, the primordial, radically contingent fact, a fact which can in no way be accounted for, is freedom itself, a freedom bound by nothing, a freedom which, in a sense, is Nothing; and the problem is, rather, how this Nothing of the abyss of primordial freedom becomes entangled in the causal chains of reason.

p. 18: Anti-Fichtean here is Schelling's assertion of a radical split--an ontological incompatibility, even--between consciousness and freedom, in clear contrast not only to Fichte but also to the commonplace association of freedom with consciousness ('I decide freely when I make a conscious choice, whereas an unconscious decision is by definition no decision at all, but something blindly imposed'). In a sense Schelling is 'more Fichtean than Fichte himself': while he fully endorses Fichte's thesis according to which the very essence of man is his own act, he does not confine this act to self-consciousness but situates it in terms of the real kernel of man's being which precedes consciousness--man contracts his very being, his eternal character (in the double meaning of the verb which is crucial for Schelling: to harden-condense-concentrate into a consistent form of being and to get infected with being) by means of an unconscious primordial act of decision.

p. 20: The emergence of Freedom means that Spirit has posited itself as such in opposition to its impenetrable-inert Ground, that it has acquired a distance towards its Ground and can now 'make free with it', and that the 'chain of being' is broken--that is to say, Spirit is no longer determined by the network of causality. Freedom is thus stricto sensu the moment of eternity--it stands for the suspension of the temporal chain of (sufficient) reasons-causes, for the leap from the enchainment [Verkettung] of finite, determinate entities into the abyss of their primordial origin, of the 'source of things'.

In the experience of freedom, in the vortex we perceive for a brief moment when we confront a groundless act of freedom, we 'rejoin the Absolute'--that is, we re-establish contact--our identity even--with the primordial origin outside temporal reality, with the abyss of eternity prior to the fall into the world of creatures. Man is directly linked to the Absolute in so far as he occupies a unique place among created things: what re-emerges in him (and in him only) is a 'possibility-potentiality of being [Seinskonnen]' which does not immediately collapse into actuality. Other actually existing entities do not relate to possibility as such; in them, a possibility is simply realized; man only relates to possibility as such--for him, a possibility is in a sense 'more' than actuality, as if the actualization-realization of a possibility somehow already 'betrays' or 'devalues' it. This opposition, of course, coincides with the opposition between necessity and freedom: an unfree entity simply is, it coincides with its positive actuality, whereas (as Schelling asserts, announcing thereby the existentialist problematic) a free being can never be reduced to what it is, to its actual, positive presence--its 'project', the undecidable opening of what it might do or become, its 'want-to-be', is the kernel of its very existence.

pp. 21-22: The key to this enigma of the primordial deed is that 'it is done eternally [for all time], i.e. it is eternally [at any time] already done, therefore past'. What is thereby resolved is the tension between eternity and the singularity of the act: how can an act, unique by definition, a happenstance, be eternal? What is done eternally (in the sense of remaining, in its very withdrawal, the eternal foundation of the present, not just something disappearing in the recess of the past) must be eternally (at any time always-already) done, and is therefore inherently past--that is, it has to belong to a past which was never present. This is what the predicate 'unconscious' designates: a past which, although it never existed, persists as a durable foundation of the present. The paradox of such an 'eternal past' is constitutive of time: there is no time without reference to a past which was never present--that is to say, temporality, in its original dimension, is not a single line of events that runs from the past through the present to the future, but involves the tension of a relationship to an act which, precisely in so far as it was never present, in its very withdrawal, is always here as the (past) foundation of the present.

The Indivisible Remainder (3)

The aim of this book:

Slavoj Žižek, from The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters

(London: Verso, 1996, 2007), the following excerpt is from the 2007 edition, pp. 5-6:

Again, the relationship between Schelling and Hegel is the knot, the junction at which 'everything is decided'. According to the predominant doxa, in Hegel's absolute idealism and panlogicism the self-movement of the Idea generates its own content and retroactively grounds its own presuppositions, whereas Schelling introduced a gap which opens a way for the post-Hegelian problematic of finitude: the Hegelian Idea can comprehend only the ideal necessity of a thing, what a thing is, the thing in its conceptual determination, in its notional possibility; what is out of reach is the contingent fact that something exists at all, a fact which depends on a free act of creation.

This surplus which eludes notional self-mediation can be discerned exemplarily apropos of the problematic of Evil: Hegel reduces Evil to the subordinated moment in the self-mediation of Idea qua supreme Good, whereas in Schelling Evil remains a permanent possibility which can never be fully 'sublated [aufgehoben]' in and by the Good. A doxa--a cliche, even--on Schelling is that in his philosophy the subject can assert its self-presence only against the background of an obscure, dense, impenetrable Grund which withdraws-into-self the moment it is illuminated by the light of Reason: logos can never fully mediate/internalize this Otherness of the Ground--in its elementary dimension, Grund is nothing but the impediment of an Otherness which maintains forever its externality....

Is this comprehension of the Hegelian dialectical process as the self-mediation of the Notion which externalizes itself, posits its content in its independence and actuality, and then internalizes it, recognizes itself in it, adequate? Our premiss, of course, is that it is not. Our aim, however, is not simply to defend Hegel against Schelling's critique by demonstrating how Schelling misses his target and ultimately fights a straw man--this would be a rather boring, purely academic exercise. Our thesis is more complex: in the case of Schelling, as well as that of Hegel, what we may call a formal envelope of error (the standard misleading image of Schelling as the philosopher of irrational Ground, of Weltseele, etc.; the standard misleading image of Hegel as the philosopher of absolute idealism, of the accomplished self-mediation of the Notion, etc.) conceals, and simultaneously contains, an unheard-of subversive gesture which--herein resides our ultimate premiss--is the same in both cases. What is effectively at stake in our endeavor, therefore, is not to pit Hegel's wits against Schelling but to discern the contours of this gesture with regard to which the standard readings of Schelling and Hegel, these two 'formal envelopes of error', are simply two modalities to avoid it, to render it invisible. Our second premiss, of course, is that it is Lacan's psychoanalytic theory which enables us to approach this gesture, the only true Sache des Denkens.

The Indivisible Remainder (2)

Schelling Prefigues Marxian Motifs

Slavoj Žižek, from The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters

(London: Verso, 1996, 2007), the following excerpt is from the 2007 edition, p. 4:

Today, it is clearly established that Schelling prefigures a series of key Marxian motifs, up to Marx's 'revolutionary' reproach to Hegel's dialectics according to which the speculative-dialectical resolution of the contradiction leaves the actual social antagonism intact (Hegel's 'speculative positivism'). The roots of the Marxian problematic of 'commodity fetishism' in Schelling provide another link to this series. That is to say: why, precisely, did Marx choose the term fetishism in order to designate the 'theological whimsy' of the universe of commodities? What one should bear in mind here is that 'fetishism' is a religious term for (previous) 'false' idolatry as opposed to (present) true belief: for the Jews, the fetish is the Golden Calf; for a partisan of pure spirituality, fetishism designates 'primitive' superstition, the fear of ghosts and other spectral apparitions, and so forth. And the point of Marx is that the commodity universe provides the necessary fetishistic supplement to 'official' spirituality: it may well be that the 'official' ideology of our society is Christian spirituality, but its actual foundation is none the less the idolatry of the Golden Calf: money.

The Indivisible Remainder (1)

The Aim of the Critique of Ideology

Slavoj Žižek, from The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters

(London: Verso, 1996, 2007), the following excerpts are from the 2007 edition, pp. 1-3:

p. 1: [....] "what we discover in the deepest kernel of our personality is a fundamental, constitutive, primordial lie, the proton pseudos, the phantasmatic construction by means of which we endeavor to conceal the inconsistency of the symbolic order in which we dwell."

p. 2: [....] "the 'natural state' of the human animal is to live in a lie."

p. 3: [....] "the symptom of Power: the grotesque excess by means of which, in a unique short circuit, attitudes which are officially opposed and mutually exclusive reveal their uncanny complicity, where the solemn agent of Power suddenly starts to wink at us across the table in a gesture of obscene solidarity, letting us know that the thing (i.e. his orders) is not to be taken too seriously, and thereby consolidating his power. The aim of the 'critique of ideology', the analysis of an ideological edifice, is to extract this symptomal kernel which the official, public ideological text simultaneously disavows and needs for its undisturbed functioning. One is tempted to say that each of the three main politico-ideological positions ('Right', 'Centre', 'Left') relies on such an unacknowledged yet unavoidable supplement: the 'Right' finds it difficult to conceal its fascination with the myth of a 'primordial' act of violence supposed to ground the legal order; the 'Centre' counts on innate human egotism (between the lines, liberalism as a rule addresses the individual's egotistic indifference to other people's plight); the 'Left', as has long been discerned by perspicacious conservative critics from Nietzsche onwards, manipulates with ressentiment and the promise of revenge ('Now it's our turn to...').

The conclusion to be drawn from this, however, is not that there is no escape, that every subversion of the existing power structure is false, illusory, caught in advance in the network of what it endeavors to undermine, but the exact opposite: every power structure is necessarily split, inconsistent; there is a crack in the very foundation of its edifice--and this crack can be used as a lever for the effective subversion of the power structure....In short, the foundations of Power can be shaken because the very stability of its might edifice hinges on an inconsistent, fragile balance. The other conclusion to be drawn is deeply solidary with the preceding one, although it may give rise to the false impression of contradicting it: perhaps the moment has come to leave behind the old Leftist obsession with ways and means to 'subvert' or 'undermine' the Order, and to focus on the opposite question--on what, following Ernesto Laclau, we can call the 'ordering of the Order': not how can we undermine the existing order, but how does an Order emerge out of disorder in the first place? Which inconsistencies and splittings allow the edifice of Order to maintain itself?

The Subject Supposed to Know

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 250-251:

However, the 'big Other' is not simply the decentred symbolic 'substance'; the further crucial feature is that this 'substance' is, in turn, again subjectivized, experienced as the 'subject supposed to know', the Other of the (forever split, hysterical) subject, the guarantor of the consistency of the field of knowledge. As such, the 'subject supposed to know' is often embodied in a concrete individual, not only God himself (the paradoxical function of God as qua big Other from Descartes through Hobbes and Newton, and so on, up to Einstein is precisely to guarantee the materialist mechanism of Nature--God is the ultimate guarantee that 'nature does not play at dice', but obeys its own laws, but even some quasi-empirical figure; let us recall this well-known passage from Heidegger:

[blockquote from Heidegger] "Recently I got a second invitation to teach at the University of Berlin. On that occasion I left Freiburg and withdrew to the cabin. I listened to what the mountains and the forest and the farmlands were saying, and I went to see an old friend of mine, a 75-year-old farmer. He had read about the call to Berlin in the newspaper. What would he say? Slowly he fixed the sure gaze of his clear eyes on mine, and keeping his mouth tightly shut, he thoughtfully put his faithful hand on my shoulder. Ever so slightly he shook his head. That meant: absolutely no."

Here we have it all: the uncorrupted/experienced old farmer as the subject supposed to know who, with his barely perceptible gesture, a prolongation of the whisper of 'the mountains and the forest', provides the definitive answer....On a different level, did not a reference to the judgement of an authentic member of the working class play the same role in some versions of Marxism-Leninism? And is it not true that even today, multiculturalist 'politically correct' discourse attributes the same authentic stance of the one 'supposed to know' to some privileged (African-American, gay...) figure of the Other?

"...these voices will start to reverberate..."

From The Coming Insurrection, by The Invisible Committee, originally published as L'insurrection qui vient by Editions La Fabrique, Paris, 2007 (available at http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/.)

Excerpts from the semiotext(e) intervention series, distributed by The MIT Press, pp. 128-130:

[....]

"Take up arms. Do everything possible to make their use unnecessary. Against the army, the only victory is political."

[....] "The militarization of civil war is the defeat of insurrection."

[....] "An insurrection triumphs as a political force. It is not impossible to defeat an army politically."

[....]

Dialectics and Noir (2)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 248-9:

[....] The key to the 'drama of false appearances' is therefore that, in it, less overlaps with more. On the one hand, the standard procedure of censorship is not to show the (prohibited) event (murder, sex act) directly, but in the way it is reflected in the witnesses; on the other hand, this deprivation opens up a space to be filled in by phantasmatic projections--that is to say, it is possible that the gaze which does not see what is actually going on clearly sees more, not less.

Similarly, the notion of noir (or of 'poststructuralist deconstructionism', for that matter), although it results from a limited foreign perspective, perceives in its object a potential which is invisible to those who are directly engaged in it. That is the ultimate dialectical paradox of truth and falsity: sometimes, the aberrant view which misreads a situation from its limited perspective can, by virtue of this very limitation, perceive the 'repressed' potential of the observed constellation. It is true that, if we submit productions usually designated as noir to a close historical analysis, the very concept of film noir loses its consistency, and disintegrates; paradoxically, however, we should none the less insist that Truth is on the level of the spectral (false) appearance of noir, not in detailed historical knowledge. The effectiveness of this concept of noir is that which today enables us immediately to identify as noir the short scene from Lady in the Lake, the simple line of a dialogue in which the detective answers the question 'But why did he kill her? Didn't he love her? with a straight 'That is reason enough to kill'.

Furthermore, sometimes the external misperception exerts a productive influence on the misperceived 'original' itself, forcing it to become aware of its own 'repressed' truth (arguably, the French notion of noir, although it is the result of misperception, exerted a strong influence on American film-making). Is not the supreme example of this productivity of the external misperception the American reception of Derrida? Did it not--although it clearly was a misperception--exert a retroactive productive influence on Derrida himself, forcing him to confront ethico-political issues more directly? Was not the American reception of Derrida in this sense a kind of pharmakon, a supplement to the 'original' Derrida himself--a poisonous stain-fake, distorting the original and at the same time keeping it alive? In short, would Derrida still be so much 'alive' if we were to subtract from his work its American misperception?Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 244-5: