The Indivisible Remainder (11)

Symbolic Identification and the Remainder

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. 46-7: The crucial point not to be missed here is that in so far as we are dealing with Subject, the 'contraction' in question is no longer the primordial contraction by means of which the original Freedom catches being and thereby gets caught in the rotary motion of contraction and expansion, but the contraction of the subject outside himself, in an external sign, which resolves the tension, the 'inner dispute', of contraction and expansion. The paradox of the Word is therefore that its emergence resolves the tension of the pre-symbolic antagonism, but at a price: the Word, the contraction of the Self outside the Self, involves an irretrievable externalization-alienation--with the emergence of the Word, we pass from antagonism to the Hegelian contradiction between $ and S1, between the subject and its inadequate symbolic representation. This 'contingency' of the contraction in the Word points toward what, in good old structuralist terms, is called 'the arbitrary of the signifier': Schelling asserts the irreducible gap between the subject and a signifier which the subject has to 'contract' if he is to acquire (symbolic) existence: the subject qua $ is never adequately represented in a signifier. This 'contradiction' between the subject and his (necessarily, constitutively inadequate) symbolic representation provides the context for Schelling's 'Lacanian' formulation according to which God-Absolute becomes inexpressible at the very moment He expresses Himself, that is, pronounces a Word. Prior to his symbolic externalization, the subject cannot be said to be 'inexpressible', since the medium of expression itself is not yet given--or, to invoke Lacan's precise formulation, desire is non-articulable precisely as always-already articulated in a signifying chain.

In short, by means of the Word, the subject finally finds himself, comes to himself: he is no longer a mere obscure longing for himself since, in the Word, he directly attains himself, posits himself as such. The price, however, is the irretrievable loss of the subject's self-identity: the verbal sign that stands for the subject--in which the subject posits himself as self-identical--bears the mark of an irreducible dissonance; it never 'fits' the subject. This paradoxical necessity on account of which the act of returning-to-oneself, of finding oneself, immediately, in its very actualization, assumes the form of its opposite, of the radical loss of one's self-identity, displays the structure of what Lacan calls 'symbolic castration'. This castration involved in the passage to the Word can also be formulated as the redoubling, the splitting, of an element into itself and its place in the structure.

p. 49: Lacan's further point is that symbolic identification is always identification with le trait unaire, the unary feature. Let us recall Lacan's own example from the Seminar on identification (which actually originates in Saussure): the 10.45 train from Paris to Lyon. Although, materially, the train is not 'the same' (carriages and the locomotive probably change every couple of days), it is symbolically counted as 'the same', namely 'the 10.45 to Lyon'. And even when the train is late (when, say, due to a mechanical failure, it actually leaves at 11.05), it is still the same '10.45 to Lyon' which, unfortunately, is late.... Le trait unaire is therefore the ideal feature that enables us to identify the train as 'the same' even if it does not fit the material features contained in its designation. As such, le trait unaire dwells on the borderline between the Imaginary and the Symbolic: it is an image, which, by being cut out of the continuity of 'reality', has started to function as a symbol. This borderline is perhaps best illustrated by the notion of insignia: an image that functions as a symbol, as a 'trademark'--it stands for its bearer, although he no longer possesses the property it designates. One must be very careful here not to miss the difference between this concept of trait unaire and the standard idealist or Gestaltist notion of ideal unity which repeats itself as identical in the diversity of its empirical realizations: the point of (Saussure's and) Lacan's example of the train is that the feature '10.45 to Lyon' remains valid even when it is 'falsified'--when the train actually leaves, say, at 11.07.

p. 50: This Schellingian problematic of the primordial dissonance in the process of the subject's representation also enables us to avoid the fatal trap of accepting too hastily the so-called 'critique of the reflective model of consciousness': according to this doxa, we cannot ground our direct, immediate experience of the Sense of Being in notional reflection, there is always some remainder which cannot be accounted for by means of reflection, so we have to presuppose an original pre-reflective 'opening to the world' or 'self acquaintance' which precedes reflective self-consciousness.... The first thing to note here is that Schelling himself, to whom this critique usually refers as its principle forerunner, in the very gesture of asserting, against Hegel, the primacy of Being--that is, the necessary failure of every attempt to reduce Being to reflection--emphasizes again and again that this primacy is thoroughly 'empty'. As we have just seen, Schelling's point is that if the subject is effectively to 'attain itself', to 'posit itself as such' and acquire a minimum of self-acquaintance, it has to alienate-externalize itself, to 'put on' a contingent clothing. An even more important point, however, is that this critique of reflection inevitably becomes enmeshed in aporias which are none other than the good old Hegelian aporias of reflection (one usually tends to forget the key underlying claim of Hegel's logic of reflection: every attempt of reflection to accomplish the complete mediation of an immediate content fails in so far as it produces its own surplus of non-reflected immediacy).

pp. 51-2: As the term itself suggests, the premiss of 'positing' reflection is that every given positive content can be 'mediated', reduced to something 'posited', recuperated by reflective activity; there is something, however, that eludes the power of this universal reflection--itself, its own act. When reflection becomes aware of this inherent limitation to its activity, we revert to immediacy--that is to say, reflection necessarily (mis)perceives its own act in a 'reified' form, as the In-itself of an external presupposition. What is crucial for the impasse of reflection is this very oscillation of the locus of its unrecuperable kernel between the In-itself which precedes reflective activity and the reflective activity itself--and the Hegelian 'trick', of course, consists in resolving this deadlock by simply assuming the identity of these two irrecuperable kernels: the In-itself reflection endeavors vainly to catch up with, like Achilles with the tortoise, coincides with reflective activity itself--the unfathomable X of the immediate life-experience reflection is after, as it were, its own tail.... In other words, the way to break out of the vicious cycle of reflection is not to lay one's hands on some positive-immediate pre-reflective support exempted from the reflective whirlpool, but, on the contrary, to call into question this very external starting point of reflection, the immediate life-experience which allegedly eludes reflective recuperation: this immediate life-experience is 'always-already' tainted by reflection: to repeat Hegel's precise formula from his Great Logic, the (reflective-recuperative) return to the immediacy creates what it returns to. Or--to put it in Schelling's terms--one should always bear in mind that the Real, the 'indivisible remainder' which resists its reflective idealization, is not a kind of external kernel which idealization/symbolization is unable to 'swallow', to internalize, but the 'irrationality', the unaccountable 'madness', of the very founding gesture of idealization/symbolization.

The Indivisible Remainder (10)

Transition from Real to Symbolic

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. 43-44:

How, precisely, does the Word discharge the tension of the rotary motion, how does it mediate the antagonism between the contractive and the expansive force? The Word is a contraction in the guise of its very opposite, of an expansion--that is to say, in pronouncing a word, the subject contracts his being outside himself; he 'coagulates' the core of his being in an external sign. In the (verbal) sign, I--as it were--find myself outside myself, I posit my unity outside myself, in a signifier which represents me [....]

This notion of symbolization (of the pronunciation of the Word) as the contraction of the subject outside itself, i.e., in the form of its very opposite (of expansion), announces the structural/differential notion of signifier as an element whose identity stands for its very opposite (for pure difference): we enter the symbolic order the moment a feature functions as the index of its opposite [....] For the very same reason, phallus is for Lacan the 'pure' signifier: it stands for its won opposite, i.e., it functions as the signifier of castration. The transition from the Real to the Symbolic, from the realm of pre-symbolic antagonism (of contraction and expansion) to the symbolic order in which the network of signifiers is correlated to the field of meaning, can only take place by means of a paradoxical 'pure' signifier, a signifier without signified: in order for the field of meaning to emerge, i.e. in order for the series of signifiers to signify something (to have a determinate meaning), there must be a signifier (a 'something') which stands for 'nothing', a signifying element whose very presence stands for the absence of meaning (or, rather, for absence tout court). This 'nothing', of course, is the subject itself, the subject qua $, the empty set, the void which emerges as the result of the contraction in the form of expansion: when I contract myself outside myself, I deprive myself of my substantial content. [....] in the formation of the Word, He articulates outside Himself--He discloses, (sur)renders, this very ideal-spiritual essence of His being. In this precise sense, the formation of the Word is the supreme act and the paradigmatic case of creation: 'creation' means that I reveal, hand over to the Other, the innermost essence of my being.

The problem, of course, is that this second contraction, this original act of creation, this 'drawing together outside itself', is ultimately always ill-fitting, contingent--it 'betrays' the subject, represents him inadequately. here, Schelling already announces the Lacanian problematic of a vel, a forced choice which is constitutive of the emergence of the subject: the subject either persists in himself, in his purity, and thereby loses himself in empty expansion, or he gets out of himself, externalizes himself, by 'contracting' or 'putting on' a signifying feature, and thereby alienates himself--that is, is no longer what he is, the void of pure $ [....]

Therein resides Schelling's reformulation of the classical question 'Why is there something and not nothing?': in the primordial vel, the subject has to decide between 'nothing' (the unground/abyss of freedom that lacks all objective being--in Lacanian mathemes: pure$) and 'something', but always irreducibly in the sense of 'something extra, something additional, something foreign/put on, in a certain respect something contingent'.

The Indivisible Remainder (9)

Schelling's Fundamental Conceptual Opposition

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. 32-33: Schelling's 'dialectical materialism' is therefore encapsulated in his persistent claim that one should presuppose an eternally past moment when God himself was 'in the power (exponent) of B', at the mercy of the antagonism of matter, without any guarantee that A--the spiritual principle of Light--would eventually prevail over B--the obscure principle of Ground. Since there is nothing outside God, this 'crazy God'--the antagonistic rotary motion of contracted matter--has to beget out of himself a Son, that is, the Word which will resolve the unbearable tension. The undifferentiated pulsation of drives is thus supplanted by the stable network of differences which sustains the self-identity of the differentiated entities: in its most elementary dimension, the Word is the medium of differentiation.

Here we encounter what is perhaps the fundamental conceptual opposition of Schelling's entire philosophical edifice: the opposition between the atemporal 'closed' rotary motion of drives and the 'open' linear progression of time. The act of 'primordial repression' by means of which God ejects the rotary motion of drives into the eternal past, and thereby 'creates time'--opens up the difference between past and present--is His first deed as a free Subject: in accomplishing it, He suspends the crippling alternative of the subjectless abyss of Freedom and the Subject who is unfree, caught in the vicious cycle of rotary motion. Here God is in exactly the same position as man on the verge of his timeless act of choosing his eternal character: it is only via this act of primordial decision that God's freedom becomes the actual 'freedom to do Good or Evil'--that is to say, He has to choose between self-withdrawal and opening up, between psychotic madness and the Word.

The Founding text of Dialectical Materialism

pp. 37-39: The critical point of Weltalter--and at the same time the ultimate source of its breathtaking magnitude, the sign of the absolute integrity of Schelling's thought and the feature which makes the Weltalter fragments the founding text of dialectical materialism--resides in the repeated failure of Schelling's desperate endeavor to avoid the terrifying intermediate stage between the pure, blissful indifference of the primordial Freedom and God as a free Creator. What comes in between the primordial Freedom and God qua free Subject is a stage at which God is already a Subject (He becomes a Subject when, by means of contraction, He acquires reality), but not yet a free one. At this stage, after contracting being, God is submitted to the blind necessity of a constricted rotary motion, like an animal caught in a trap of its own making and destined endlessly to repeat the same meaningless motions. The problem is that God's Reason, His awareness of what goes on, in a sense comes too late, is behind this blind process; so that later, when He pronounces the Word and thereby attains actual freedom, he can in a sense acknowledge, accept, only what he 'contracted' not even unwillingly but in the course of a blindly spontaneous process in which his free Will simply played no part. In other words, the problem is that 'one has to admit a moment of blindness, even of "madness", in the divine life', on account of which creation appears as 'a process in which God was engaged at His own risk, if one may put it this way'.

The Indivisible Remainder (8)

Temporality: Schelling vs. Heidegger

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. 31-32.

One more thing should be noted about the blind rotary motion of God prior to the pronouncement of the Word: this motion is not yet temporal, it does not occur 'in time', since time already presupposes that God has broken free from the closed psychotic circle. The common expression 'from the beginning of time...' is to be taken literally: it is the Beginning, the primordial act of decision/resolution, which constitutes time--the 'repression' of the rotary motion into the eternal Past establishes the minimal distance between Past and Present which allows for the linear succession of time.

Here we encounter the first of Schelling's many anti-Platonic 'stings': eternity prior to the Word is the timeless rotary motion, the divine madness, which is beneath time, 'less than time'. However, in contrast to those who emphasize Schelling's affinity with Heidegger's assertion of temporality as the ultimate, unsurpassable horizon of Being, it should be said that nowhere is Schelling farther from Heidegger, from his analytics of finitude, than in his conception of the relationship between time and eternity. For Schelling, eternity is not a modality of time; rather, it is time itself which is a specific mode (or rather, modification) of eternity: Schelling's supreme effort is to 'deduce' time itself from the deadlock of eternity. The Absolute 'opens up time', it 'represses' the rotary motion into the past, in order to get rid of the antagonism in its heart which threatens to drag it into the abyss of madness. On the other hand--and, again, in clear contrast to Heidegger--freedom for Schelling is the moment of 'eternity in time', the point of groundless decision by means of which a free creature (man) breaks up, suspends, the temporal chain of reasons and, as it were, directly connects with the Unground of the Absolute. This Schellingian notion of eternity and time--or, to put it in more contemporary terms, of synchrony and diachrony--is therefore to be opposed to the standard notion of time as the finite/distorted reflection of the eternal Order, as well as the modern notion of eternity as a specific mode of temporality: eternity itself begets time in order to resolve the deadlock it became entangled in. For that reason, it is deeply misleading and inadequate to speak about eternity's 'fall into time': the 'beginning of time' is, on the contrary, a triumphant ascent, the act of decision/differentiation by means of which the Absolute resolves the agonizing rotary motion of drives, and breaks out of its vicious cycle into temporal succession.

Schelling's achievement here is a theory of time whose unique feature is that it is not formal but qualitative: in contrast to the standard notion of time that conceives the three temporal dimensions as purely formal determinations (the same 'content' 'travels', as it were, from the past through the present to the future), Schelling provides a minimal qualitative determination of each temporal dimension. The rotary motion of drives is in itself past: it was not once present and is now past, but is past from the beginning of time. The split as such is present--that is, the present stands for the moment of division, of the transformation of drive's undifferentiated pulsation into symbolic difference, whereas the future designates the reconciliation to come. The target of Schelling's critique here is not only the formalism of the standard notion of time but also, perhaps even primarily, the unavowed, hidden prerogative of the present involved in it--for Schelling, this prerogative equals the primacy of mechanical necessity over freedom, of actuality over possibility.

The Indivisible Remainder (7)

'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....

The Indivisible Remainder (6)

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.

The Indivisible Remainder (5)

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'.