The Indivisible Remainder (16)

Voice & Writing: Lacan vs. Derrida

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. 99-100: Derrida also likes to indulge heavily in exuberant variations on the paradoxical character of the supplement (the excessive element which is neither inside nor outside; it sticks out of the series it belongs to and simultaneously completes it, etc.). Lacan, on the contrary--by means of a gesture which for Derrida, of course, would undoubtedly signal reinscription into traditional philosophical discourse--directly offers a concept of this element, namely the concept of the Master-Signifier, S1, in relation to S2, the 'ordinary' chain of knowledge. This concept is not a simple unambiguous concept, but the concept of the structural ambiguity itself; that is to say, Lacan reunites in one and the same concept what Derrida keeps apart: in Lacan, S1 stands for the supplement--the trait which sticks out, but is as such, in its very excess, unavoidable--and, simultaneously, for the totalizing Master-Signifier. Therein, in this 'speculative identity' of supplement and Centre, resides Lacan's implicit 'Hegelian' move: the Centre Derrida endeavors to 'deconstruct' is ultimately the very supplement which threatens to disrupt its totalizing power--or, to put it in Kierkegaardese, supplement is the Centre itself 'in its becoming'. In this precise sense, supplement is both the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of the Centre.

Mutatis mutandis, the same goes for the couple voice/writing: voice provides an exemplary case of Hegelian self-identity. In his 'deconstruction' of Western logo-phono-centrism, Derrida proposed the idea that the 'metaphysics of presence' is ultimately founded upon the illusion of 'hearing-oneself-speaking [s'entendre-parler]', upon the illusory experience of the Voice as the transparent medium that enables and guarantees the speaker's immediate self-presence. In his psychoanalytic theory of voice as partial object (on a par with other such objects: breast, faeces...), Lacan supplements Derrida with the Hegelian identity as the coincidence of the opposites. True, the experience of s'entendre-parler serves to ground the illusion of the transparent self-presence of the speaking subject; however, is not the voice at the same time that which undermines most radically the subject's self-presence and self-transparence? Not writing, which undermines the voice as it were from without, from a minimal distance, but the voice itself: one is tempted to say the voice as such in its uncanny presence--I hear myself speaking, yet what I hear is never fully myself but a parasite, a foreign body in my very heart.

[....]

In the antagonistic tension between signifier and object, voice is thus on the side of the object: voice, in its fundamental dimension, is not the ideal (totally transparent, pliant, self-effacing) signifier, but its exact opposite, the opaque inertia of an objectal remainder.

[....]

In Lacan, voice prior to writing (and to the movement of differance) is a drive and, as such, caught in the antagonism of a closed circular movement; by the expulsion of its own opaque materiality into the 'externality' of writing, voice establishes itself as the ideal medium of self-transparency. The passage from this inner antagonism of the voice to the 'external' relationship between voice and writing is thus strictly analogous to the Schellingian passage from the 'closed' rotary motion of drives to the 'opening' of the difference that resolves the tension of the drives' pulsation. Perhaps therein resides the abyss that forever separates the Real of an antagonism from Derrida's differance: differance points towards the constant and constitutive deferral of impossible self-identity, whereas in Lacan, what the movement of symbolic deferral-substitution forever fails to attain is not Identity but the Real of an antagonism.

[....]

p. 101: To recapitulate: in Derrida, voice is the medium of illusory self-transparency; consequently, the fact that voice, for structural reasons, always fails to deliver this self-transparency means that voice is always-already tainted with writing [....] In Lacan's 'graph of desire', however, voice is the remainder of the signifying operation, that is, the meaningless piece of the real which stays behind once the operation of 'quilting [capitonnage]' responsible for the stabilization of meaning is performed--voice is that which, in the signifier, resists meaning, it stands for the opaque inertia which cannot be recuperated by meaning. It is only the dimension of writing which accounts for the stability of meaning [....]

The Indivisible Remainder (15)

The Idealist vs. Materialist Lacan

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. 95-6: The paradoxical stakes of our strategy are now becoming somewhat clearer: precisely in so far as our aim is to elevate Lacan to the dignity of an author who provides the key to the Grundoperation of German Idealism, perhaps the acme of the entire history of philosophy, our main opponent is a typical 'philosophical' reading of Lacan, a doxa on Lacan which reduces his teaching to the framework of traditional philosophy. Far from being a simple case of a false reading, this doxa definitely has support in Lacan: Lacan himself often yields to its temptation, since this doxa is a kind of 'spontaneous philosophy of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis'. What, then, are its basic contours?

The moment we enter the symbolic order, the immediacy of the pre-symbolic Real is lost for ever, the true object of desire ('mother') becomes impossible-unattainable. Every positive object we encounter in reality is already a substitute for this lost original, the incestuous Ding rendered inaccessible by the very fact of language--that is 'symbolic castration'. The very existence of man qua being-of-language stands thus under the sign of an irreducible and constitutive lack: we are submerged in the universe of signs which forever prevent us from attaining the Thing; so-called 'external reality' itself is already 'structured like a language', that is, its meaning is always-already overdetermined by the symbolic framework which structures our perception of reality. The symbolic agency of the paternal prohibition (the 'Name-of-the-Father') merely personifies, gives body to, the impossibility which is co-substantial with the very fact of the symbolic order--'jouissance is forbidden to him who speaks as such'.

This gap that forever separates the lost Thing from symbolic semblances which are never 'that' defines the contours of the ethics of desire: 'do not compromise your desire' can only mean 'do not put up with any of the substitutes for the Thing, keep the gap of desire open'. [....] the ethics of pure desire compels us to avoid not only debilitating contentment with the pleasures provided by the objects of phenomenal reality but also the danger of yielding to fascination with the Thing, and being drawn into its lethal vortex, which can only end in psychosis or suicidal passage a l'acte.

[....]

p. 97: On a first approach, this reading of Lacan cannot but appear convincing, almost a matter of course--yet [....] To put it somewhat bluntly, we are dealing here with an 'idealist' distortion of Lacan; to this 'idealist' problematic of desire, its constitutive lack, and so on, one has to oppose the 'materialist' problematic of the Real of drives. That is to say, for Lacan the 'Real' is not, in the Kantian mode, a purely negative category, a designation of a limit without any specification of what lies beyond--the Real qua drive is, on the contrary, the agens, the 'driving force', of desiring.

This 'active' (and not purely negative) status of drives, of the pre-symbolic 'libido', induces Lacan to elaborate the highly Schellingian myth of 'lamella': in it, he deploys--in the form of a mythical narrative, not of a conceptual articulation--the 'real genesis', that is, what had to occur prior to symbolization, prior to the emergence of the symbolic order [footnote 6]. In short, Lacan's point here is that the passage from the radically 'impossible' Real (the maternal Thing-Body which can be apprehended only in a negative way) to the reign of the symbolic Law, to desire which is regulated by Law, sustained by the fundamental Prohibition, is not direct: something happens between 'pure', 'pre-human' nature and the order of symbolic exchanges, and this 'something' is precisely the Real of drives--no longer the 'closed circuit' of instincts and their innate rhythm of satisfaction (drives are already 'derailed nature'), but not yet the symbolic desire sustained by Prohibition. The Lacanian Thing is not simply the 'impossible' Real which withdraws into the dim recesses of the Unattainable with the entry of the symbolic order, it is the very universe of drives. Here, the reference to Schelling is of crucial importance, since Schelling was the first to accomplish an analogous step within the domain of philosophy: his mythical narrative on the 'ages of the world' focuses on a process in God which precedes the actuality of the divine Logos, and, as we have already seen, this process is described in terms which clearly pave the way for Lacan's notion of the Real of drives.

[....]

pp. 173-4, [footnote 6]: On this Lacanian myth of lamella, see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1993. Incidentally, what we have just said in no way implies that the Real of drives is, in its ontological status, a kind of full substantiality, the positive 'stuff' of formal-symbolic structurations. What Lacan did with the notion of drive is strangely similar to what Einstein, in his general theory of relativity, did with the notion of gravity. Einstein 'desubstantialized' gravity by reducing it to geometry: gravity is not a substantial force which 'bends' space but the name for the curvature of space itself; in an analogous way, Lacan 'desubstantialized' drives: a drive is not a primordial positive force but a purely geometrical, topological phenomenon, the name for the curvature of the space of desire--for the paradox that, within this space, the way to attain the object (a) is not to go straight for it (the surest way to miss it) but to encircle it, to 'go round in circles'. Drive is this purely topological 'distortion' of the natural instinct which finds satisfaction in a direct consumption of its object.

The Indivisible Remainder (14)

Reason's Condition of Possibility

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. 77-79: Reason's condition of possibility is the condition of its impossibility--or, as Lacan would have put it, 'there's One [y'a de l'Un]': a consistent rational structure has to be anchored to an 'irrational' exception of One which, in its very capacity as an exception, guarantees the structure's consistency. For that reason--and again, everything hinges on this point--'repression' is always double: not only is the Real 'repressed'--mediated, sublated, domesticated--by the Ideal, pressed into the service of the Ideal, but the Ideal Order itself emerges only in so far as its own 'madness'--the violent act of its imposition, or, in Kierkegaardian terms: its own 'becoming'--is 'repressed'. In short, the obscure Ground is not merely the basis, the background, of the Light of Reason, but primarily the dark spot of the very gesture which gives rise to Light as opposed to Darkness. The unconscious act, the decision which breaks up the drives' 'irrational' rotary motion, is itself radically contingent, groundless--in short: 'irrational'.

[....]

So it is not sufficient to assert that Reason is nothing but 'regulated madness': the very gesture of regulating madness is stricto sensu mad. Or--to put it in yet another way: it is not sufficient to assert that Reason discerns islands of Necessity in the sea of Chaos--the very gesture of instituting Necessity is in itself radically contingent.

[....] the vortex of the Real is not the ultimate fact, since it is preceded by the abyss of pure Freedom as the absolute indifference of A and B. Schelling's point is not, therefore, that A is ultimately bound to serve B; rather, it resides in the irreducible gap between pure Freedom ($) and every symbolic scheme of Reason, every determinate symbolic representation of the subject in A, in the ideal medium. The leap from $ (pure Freedom) to A is possible only via a detour through B, in the medium of B; in other words, it is radically contingent: if the subject ($) is to represent-express itself in A, it has to rely on B, on a contracted element which eludes idealization. In Lacanian terms: there is no symbolic representation without fantasy, that is, the subject ($) is constitutively split between S1 and a; it can represent itself in S1, in a signifier, only in so far as the phantasmic consistency of the signifying network is guaranteed by a reference to objet petit a.

The Indivisible Remainder (13)

The Real, the Ground, 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.

p. 74: The paradox one must sustain, however, is that the universe of 'spiritual' products is none the less rooted in its Ground. The present threat of global ecological catastrophe provides the ultimate proof [....]

p. 75: The Ground is rather like the figure of woman in David Lynch's films: the traumatic Thing, the point of simultaneous attraction and repulsion, which stands for the vortex of Life itself threatening to draw us into its depressive abyss. And does not this pre-predicative vortex of the Real point directly towards the Lacanian jouissance? Does not Schelling himself determine the Real [das Reale] as the circular movement of 'irrational' (i.e. pre-logical, pre-symbolic) drives which find satisfaction in the very 'meaningless' repetition of their circular path? For Schelling (as well as for Lacan) this Real is the Limit, the ultimate obstacle on account of which every 'semantic idealism', every attempt to deploy the Absolute as a self-enclosed matrix generating all possible significations of Being, is destined to fail.

pp. 76-7: Every Organization of Sense, every universal conceptual scheme by means of which we endeavor to comprehend reality, is in itself--at its most fundamental, for structural reasons and not merely due to contingent circumstances--biased, out of balance, 'crazy', minimally 'paranoiac' (as the early Lacan would have put it): its imposition disturbs the 'natural order of things' and throws the universe off balance. In other words, there is no neutral Universality: every Universality, every attempt at All, at a global comprehension, bears the indelible mark of a 'pathological' exclusiveness of One--that is, it hinges on the 'partiality' of its position of enunciation. So, again, it is not sufficient to say that no conceptual structure is perfectly neutral, that it fails to comprehend reality in a truly impartial way; the point is, rather, that the status of this 'bias' is a priori, structural.

We are dealing here with the inherent constituent of the emergence of a formal structure--in short, with the condition of the structure's consistency: but for this exclusive base in a One--but for this partiality and distortion sustained by a minimum of Egotism--the structure disintegrates, loses its consistency in the dispersed plurality. When we repeat after Schelling that every Order arises on the basis of and has its roots in a general Disorder, we are therefore not making the usual relativist point that man's ordering activity is limited to local attempts to introduce a minimum of Order into the wide ocean of primordial chaos--to attempts which, as such, are ultimately doomed to fail; our point is, rather, that the very imposition of an Order is an act of supreme violence--Order is a violent imposition which throws the universe out of joint. Disorder is the condition of possibility of Order not only in the sense that the very notion of Order is conceivable only against the background of general Disorder, as a series of local attempts to limit the Disorder--the highest Disorder, the highest violation of 'natural balance', is the very imposition of a (biased) Order. So we are back at our starting point: the 'unconscious' is not primarily the Real in its opposition to the Ideal; in its most radical dimension, the 'unconscious' is, rather, the very act of decision/differentiation by means of which the Ideal establishes itself in its opposition to the Real and imposes its Order on to the Real, the act by means of which the rotary motion of drives is 'repressed' into the eternal past.

p. 77: In other words, the elementary idealist illusion resides in belief in the possibility of a purely neutral Universal, a Universal which is not 'anchored' to a particular material locus (or, with regard to language, the belief in a pure enunciated which does not involve a particular/partial subjective position of enunciation).

The Indivisible Remainder (12)

Schelling's Materialist Notion of Subject

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. 71-3: True freedom means not only that I am not fully determined by my surroundings but also that I am not fully determined by myself (by my own notion, by what I am, by my positive features): a person relates freely both to her existence and to her notion--that is to say,she is not fully determined by them but can transcend them (she can put at stake, risk, her existence as well as transform the bundle of features which make up her identity). The fact that Another Person is for me originally an enigma, an abyss beyond her positive features, accounts for the key role of the symbolic obligation and debt, of this desperate attempt to bind the Other, in intersubjective relations: since I cannot take hold of the Other, of the abyss which forms the elusive centre of her being, directly, I can only take her at her Word. And Schelling simply took seriously and literally the fact that God Himself, this absolute Other, is also a free person: as such, He also could become free only by gaining a distance towards the Ground of His being, by relating freely to this Ground, by not being wholly determined by it. The paradox (sacrilegious from the orthodox point of view, of course) is that this free relationship towards the Ground presupposes, is the obverse of, dependency on the Ground: God's Light, the creative emanation of His Logos, is, as Schelling puts it, a 'regulated madness' which draws its energy from the vortex of drives, as with a human person who is truly free not by opposing his drives but by adroitly exploiting their energy, regulating their madness....

Paradoxical as it may sound, with this specific notion of freedom as the subject's free relating to her existence and notion Schelling was the first to delineate the contours of a materialist notion of subject. In the standard (idealist and materialist) version of the philosophical opposition of subject and object, materiality is always on the side of the object: the object is dense, impenetrable and inert, whereas the subject stands for the transparency of the Thought to itself; within this horizon, the only way to assert a 'materialist' position is by trying to demonstrate how the subject is always-already an object (like the Derridean endeavor to demonstrate that the voice is always-already a writing, that it always-already contains some material trace which introduces into it the minimum of self-deferral, of non-coincidence with itself).

In clear contrast to this standard version, the materialist notion of subject outlined by Schelling (but also by Hegel, in his deservedly famous description of the struggle for recognition between the (future) Master and Servant--not to mention Lacan, of course) focuses on the fundamental 'impenetrability', the inert density, which always pertains to our encounter with Another Subject--which distinguishes this encounter from the encounter with an ordinary object. Again, paradoxical as it may sound, ordinary objects are in this precise sense less 'material' than Another Subject, since they lack the opacity characteristic of the Other's desire, the eternal enigma of 'Che vuoi?', of what does the Other want from me? One is led by this to assert that the Freudian-Lacanian (and already Kantian) Ding is originally the Other Subject, not a mere non-subjective thing--an ordinary material object is in the end always transparent, it lacks the enigma which would render it effectively opaque.... This original violence of the Other, the violence constitutive of what Heidegger called Mit-Sein, our relating to another human being, is what gets completely lost in the Habermasian ideology of the free space of intersubjective dialogue--perhaps even Heidegger's otherwise exemplary analysis of Mit-Sein in Being and Time passes too quickly over this traumatic dimension.

It is against the background of this materialist notion of subject that one can comprehend the limit of Schelling's philosophical enterprise, and thereby the cause of the failure of the Weltalter project. As we have already indicated, the criticism of Schelling which seems to impose itself from a Lacanian standpoint concerns his inability to 'traverse the fantasy': does not Schelling remain caught in the phantasmic loop? Does not the Schellingian problematic of a timeless act which is always-already accomplished and thereby precedes its own temporal genesis--that is, is present prior to its actual emergence--involve the structure of fantasy at its purest? And, furthermore, is not this presupposition of such an eternal act also the elementary matrix of ideology? So is not the most one can say about Schelling that he states openly the constitutive paradox (the temporal loop, the 'always-already') of ideology? Does he not thereby evade the true 'materialist' question: how does a material-temporal process retroactively engender its own phantasmic foundation?

The answer is no: what, according to Schelling, precedes the material-temporal process is not an ideal order, and so on, but the pure void/abyss [Ungrund] of Freedom, and Schelling's point is precisely that if Freedom is to actualize itself--that is, to become the predicate of a free Entity--it has to 'contract' the opaque Ground. The problem is, rather, that Schelling formulates the 'out-of-jointedness', the imbalance involved in this primordial contraction, as the ontological condition of the universe ('there is something and not nothing' only through a primordial catastrophe, only in so far as things are out of joint...), in the very form of the pre-modern mythology of a sexualized universe (of the primordial balance to be re-established, etc.). Here his ambiguity is radical and irreducible: the logic of his thought compels him to assert the inevitability of the 'out-of-jointedness' and of man's Fall--at the very point at which A should prevail over B, things have to go wrong--but the same logic leads him to maintain the dream of final reconciliation--it should be possible to heal the wound and to reinstate the lost balance, that is, the harmonious line of development of the 'great chain of being' from the lower to the higher stages (see, for example, the dialogue Clara, contemporaneous with Weltalter, in which death is reduced to the passage from the lower, terrestrial life to the higher 'world of Spirits [Geisterwelt]'). We are therefore back where we started: error cannot simply be subtracted from Truth--that is to say, it was possible for Schelling to accomplish the unheard-of step to radical contingency only in the guise of a 'regression' to the pre-modern mythology of a sexualized universe. This very 'regression' enabled him to formulate the materialist concept of subject (the opaque-enigmatic Otherness of freedom) in contrast to the purely spiritual 'idealist' subject: the materialist subject as the point at which nature 'runs amok' and goes off the rails....

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'.