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'Contraction' as Religious and Ethnic Fundamentalism

From The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1996 & 2007). The following citation is from the 2007 edition, p. 27.

Perhaps the supreme ideologico-political example of contraction is provided by today's religious and ethnic fundamentalisms which are merging as a reaction to the withering-away of the Nation-State. The key fact of today's world is the unheard-of expansion of capitalism, which is less and less bound by the form of the Nation-State, capitalism's hitherto fundamental unit of contraction, and asserts itself more and more in direct 'transnational' form; the reaction to this boundless expansion which threatens to sweep away every particular self-identity are 'postmodern' fundamentalisms as the violent 'contraction' of social life into its religious-ethnic roots. Is not this contraction a kind of mocking imitation of the Schellingian primordial act of choosing one's own eternal character? In rediscovering one's ethnic roots or religious tradition (all of which, of course, are faked retroactive projections), a social group as it were chooses its eternal nature--that is, freely decides what it always-already was....

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Discipline as the Condition of Freedom (cf. Lacan's Name of the Father and 'symbolic castration')

From The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1996 & 2007). The following citation is from the 2007 edition, pp. 25-26.

Let us refer again to Hogrebe, who evokes another nice analogy from athletics: just before the start, the runner has to 'contract'-concentrate himself, to 'immobilize' himself, to turn himself into a statue, so that he can then, at the sound of the pistol, spring up and run as fast as possible--or, as Lenin would have put it, 'one step backwards, two steps forward'. In this precise sense the Beginning is the opposite of the Process itself: the preparatory-contractive 'step back', the setting up of a foundation which then serves as the springboard for taking off and rushing forward--in short, the denial [Verneinung] of what follows, of what is the beginning: 'only in the denial is there a beginning'.

On a somewhat higher, more 'spiritual' level, one usually fails to take note of how a free play of our theoretical imagination is possible only against the background of a firmly established set of 'dogmatic' conceptual constraints: our intellectual creativity can be 'set free' only within the confines of some imposed notional framework in which, precisely, we are able to 'move freely'--the lack of this imposed framework is necessarily experienced as an unbearable burden, since it compels us to focus constantly on how to respond to every particular empirical situation in which we find ourselves. Suffice it to recall the paradoxical lesson of so-called 'closed' societies: when an ideological edifice is imposed as the obligatory frame of reference (as it was with Marxism in 'actually existing Socialism'), the subject is relieved of the pressure to ponder all the time upon the basic conceptual schema--the rules of the game are clearly defined, so one can devote one's intellectual energy to the game itself.... On a rather different plane, the same experience is regularly reported by Japanese scientists: questioned by their Western colleagues on how they can stand the stiff hierarchy and the rules of ritualized courtesy which regulate intersubjective relations even in scientific communities (openly to contradict a higher authority is considered extremely coarse behaviour, etc.), they claim that these imposed rules of proper conduct enable them to dismiss from their mind any concern about intersubjective tensions, and to concentrate wholly on scientific work and inventions.

The most acute philosophical formulation of this motif of 'discipline as the condition of freedom' is found in Hegel who, in 'Anthropology' (Subsection A of Part I of his Philosophy of Mind), emphasized the liberating aspect of habit: it enables us to dispense with continuous, time-consuming worries about how to react to the multitude of ever-new empirical situations surrounding us. Habit provides ready-made answers which can be applied blindly, without reflection; when a habit becomes our second nature which we follow spontaneously, this very unawareness of the rules which regulate our activity sets our mind free for higher spiritual matters. In short, what effectively sets us free is the 'mechanical' contraction of our dealing with immediate surroundings in the network of habits which forms our 'second nature'. The supreme example, of course, is language itself as the paradigm of all institutions: one is effectively able to think freely only when one is fully accustomed to the language in which one thinks--when one loses awareness of its rules and learns to follow them 'blindly'. The moment one has to pay attention to the rules of grammar, and so on, one's thought no longer moves freely, but begins to drag--the free expansion of thinking has its Ground in the 'contraction' of grammatical and other rules. The example of custom clearly demonstrates that contraction is not the external opposite to free expansion: the free activity of thinking does not assert itself against custom; rather, it takes place in the very medium of (linguistic) custom--we 'think freely' only when we follow the rules of language without being aware of them.

Finally, when all is said and done, this is what self-identity is about: a self-identity is never fully transparent--the more it is 'self-', the more it implies a minimum of opaque contraction which holds it together and thus prevents it from dispersing.

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Schelling's God as Fantasy

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

pp.22-23: Is not the God prior to the primordial contraction, this pure gaze which finds enjoyment in contemplating its own non-being, also therefore a fantasy-formation at its purest? Schelling emphasizes again and again that the passage of the pure Seinskönnen of the primordial Abyss into the contracted Ground cannot be accounted for or 'deduced': it can be described (narrated) only post festum, after it has already taken place, since we are dealing not with a necessary act but with a free act which could also not have happened--however, does this not amount to an implicit admission of the fact that its status is that of a retroactive fantasy?

Schelling's God as Psychotic

p. 24: What we have here is Schelling's grandiose "Wagnerian" vision of a 'psychotic', mad God who is absolutely alone, a One who is 'all' since He tolerates nothing outside Himself--a 'wild madness, tearing itself apart'. The horror of this rotary motion resides in the fact that it is no longer impersonal: God already exists as One, as the Subject who suffers and endures the antagonism of drives. Here Schelling provides a precise definition of anxiety: anxiety arises when a subject experiences simultaneously the impossibility of closing itself up, of withdrawing fully into itself, and the impossibility of opening itself up, admitting an Otherness, so that it is caught in a vicious cycle of pulsation--every attempt at creation-expansion-externalization repeatedly 'aborts', collapses back into itself. This God is not yet the Creator, since a proper act of creation posits the being (the contracted reality) of an Otherness which possesses a minimal self-consistency and exists outside its Creator--this, however, is what God, in the fury of his egotism, is not inclined to tolerate.

And, as Schelling emphasizes again and again, even today this all-destructive divine vortex remains the innermost base of all reality: 'if we were able to penetrate the exterior of things, we would see that the true stuff of all life and existence is the horrible'. In this sense, all reality involves a fundamental antagonism and is therefore, sooner or later, destined to fall prey to Divine fury, to disappear in the 'orgasm of forces'. 'Reality' is inherently fragile, the result of a temporary balance between contraction and expansion which can, at any moment, 'run amok' and explode into one of the extremes. Hogrebe resorts here to an analogy from cinema: if the projection of a film is to give rise to an 'impression of reality' in the spectator, the reel has to run at the proper speed--if it runs too quickly, the movement on the screen is blurred and we can no longer discern individual objects; if it is too slow, we perceive individual pictures and the effect of continuity which accounts for the impression that we are watching 'real life' is lost. Therein resides Schelling's fundamental motif: what we experience as 'reality' is constituted and maintains itself through a proper balance in the tension between the two antagonistic forces, with the ever-present danger that one of the two sides will 'be cracked', run out of control and thus destroy the 'impression of reality'.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?