The Indivisible Remainder (19)

Hegel/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.

p. 126: [....] Hegel emphasizes again and again that Christ dies on the Cross for real--he returns as the Spirit of the community of believers, not in person.

p. 126-7: Hegel's whole point is that the subject does NOT survive the ordeal of negativity: he effectively loses his very essence, and passes over into his Other. One is tempted to evoke here the science-fiction theme of changed identity, when a subject biologically survives, but is no longer the same person--this is what the Hegelian transubstantiation is about, and of course, it is this very transubstantiation which distinguishes Subject from Substance: 'subject' designates that X which was able to survive the loss of its substantial identity, and to continue to live as the 'empty shell of its former self'.

An analogous transubstantiation is at work in the Hegelian 'cunning of reason': in the triad of Ends, Means and Object, the effective unity, the mediating agency, is not the End but the Means: the means effectively effectively dominate the entire process by mediating between the End and the external Object in which the End is to be realized-actualized. The End is thus far from dominating the means and the Object: the End and the external Object are the two objectivizations of means qua the movable medium of negativity. In short, Hegel's result is that the End is ultimately a 'means of means themselves', a means self-posited by means to set in motion its mediating activity. [....] The point of the 'cunning of reason' is thus not that the End realizes itself via a detour: the End the subject has been pursuing throughout the process is effectively lost, since the actual End is precisely what agents caught up in the process experience as mere Means. In the end, the End is realized, but not the End which was posited at the outset, as with the subject who returns to himself, but is no longer the same 'self' as the subject who got lost at the outset....

pp. 127-8: This is also how one should reformulate the different status of reflection in the 'objective' logic of essence and the 'subjective' logic of notion: the logic of essence still involves the 'objective', substantial, notion of Essence as a kind of substratum which reflects itself in its Other, that is, which posits Otherness as its inessential double (its effect, form, appearance...), but is unable to effectuate its full mediation with it--it endeavors to preserve the kernel of its self-identity 'undamaged', exempted from the reflective mediation, which is why it becomes entangled in a mass of aporias. It is only at the level of the notion that 'substance' effectively 'becomes subject', since in it reflection is 'absolute'; that is to say, the process of 'transubstantiation' gets under way through which substance itself becomes the predicate of (what was) its own predicate. The standard criticism of Hegel--according to which the Hegelian absolute Subject does not really expose itself to Otherness, but merely plays a narcissistic game of self-alienation and reappropriation with itself--fails to take into account the fact that in Hegelian 'alienation', the substance is lost for good.

pp. 128-9,

[From the subsection: There is no subject without an empty signifier]

One can also make the same point by focusing on the dialectics of In-itself and For-itself. In today's ecological struggles, the position of the 'mute In-Itself' of the abstract Universal is best epitomized by an external observer who apprehends 'ecology' as the neutral universality of a genus which then subdivides itself into a multitude of species (feminist ecology, socialist ecology, New Age ecology, conservative ecology, etc.); however, for a subject who is 'within', engaged in the ecological fight, there is no such neutral universality. For a feminist ecologist, say, the impending threat of ecological catastrophe results from the male attitude of domination and exploitation, so that she is not a feminist and an ecologist--feminism provides her with the specific content of her ecological identity, that is, for her a 'non-feminist ecologist' is not another kind of ecologist, but simply somebody who is not a true ecologist. The--properly Hegelian--problem of the "For-itself' of a Universal is therefore: how, under what concrete conditions, can the universal dimension become 'for itself', how can it be posited 'as such', in explicit contrast to its particular qualifications [....]

The Indivisible Remainder (18)

Misguided Postmodern Critique of Hegel

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. 125-6: A postmodern commonplace against Hegel is the criticism of 'restrained economy': in the dialectical process, loss and negativity are contained in advance, accounted for--what gets lost is merely the inessential aspect (and the very fact that a feature has been lost counts as the ultimate proof of its inessential status), whereas one can rest assured that the essential dimension will not only survive, but even be strengthened by the ordeal of negativity. The whole (teleological) point of the process of loss and recuperation is to enable the Absolute to purify itself, to render its essential dimension manifest by getting rid of the inessential, like a snake which, from time to time, has to cast off its skin to rejuvenate itself....

We can now see where this reproach, which imputes to Hegel the obsessional economy of 'I can give you everything but that', goes wrong and misses its target: Hegel's basic premiss is that every attempt to distinguish the Essential from the Inessential always proves itself false--whenever I resort to the strategy of renouncing the Inessential in order to save the Essential, sooner or later (but always when it's already too late) I am bound to discover that I made a fatal mistake when I decided what is essential, and the essential dimension has already slipped through my fingers. The crucial aspect of a proper dialectical reversal is this shift in the very relationship between the Essential and the Inessential--when, for example, I defend my unprincipled flattery of my superiors by claiming that it amounts to mere external accommodation, whereas deep in my heart I stick to my true convictions and despise them, I blind myself to the reality of the situation: I have already given way on what really matters, since it is my inner conviction, sincere as it may be, which is effectively 'inessential'....

The 'negation of negation' is not a kind of existential sleight of hand by means of which the subject pretends to put everything at stake, but effectively sacrifices only the inessential; rather, it stands for the horrifying experience which occurs when, after sacrificing everything I considered 'inessential', I suddenly realize that the very essential dimension for the sake of which I sacrificed the inessential is already lost. The subject does save his skin, he survives the ordeal, but the price he has to pay is the loss of his very substance, of the most precious kernel of his individuality. More precisely: prior to this 'transubstantiation' the subject is not a subject at all, since 'subject' is ultimately the name for this very 'transubstantiation' of substance which, after its dissemination, 'returns to itself', but not as 'the same'.

It is all too easy, therefore, to be misled by Hegel's notorious propositions concerning Spirit as the power of 'tarrying with the negative', that is, of resurrecting after its own death: in the ordeal of absolute negativity, the Spirit in its particular selfhood effectively dies, is over and done with, so that the Spirit which 'resurrects' is not the Spirit which previously expired.

The Indivisible Remainder (17)

The dialectico-materialist 'and' versus the idealist-ideological 'and'

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. 103: What is at stake here could also be formulated as the problem of the status of 'and' as a category. In Althusser, 'and' functions as a precise theoretical category: when an 'and' appears in the title of some of his essays, this little word unmistakably signals the confrontation of some general ideological notion (or, more precisely, of a neutral, ambiguous notion that oscillates between its ideological actuality and its scientific potentiality) with its specification which tells us how we are to concretize this notion so that it begins to function as non-ideological, as a strict theoretical concept. 'And' thus splits up the ambiguous starting unity, introduces into it the difference between ideology and science. [....]

p. 104: 'And' is thus, in a sense, tautological: it conjoins the same content in its two modalities--first in its ideological evidence, then in the extra-ideological conditions of its existence. For that reason, no third term is needed here to designate the medium itself in which the two terms, conjoined by means of the 'and', encounter each other: this third term is already the second term itself which stands for the network (the 'medium') of the concrete existence of an ideological universality. In contrast to this dialectico-materialist 'and', the idealist-ideological 'and' functions precisely as this third term, as the common medium of the polarity or plurality of elements. [....]

pp. 104-105: The difference between these two 'ands'--the 'idealist' one which stands for the medium of the coexistence of the two poles, and the 'materialist' one in which the second term designates the concrete medium of existence of the first (of the ideological universality)--renders Schelling's radical ambiguity clearly perceptible. In a materialist perspective, the 'and' in Schelling's qualification of freedom in its actuality as 'the freedom for good and evil' points toward the uncanny fact that Evil is the concrete existence of the Good. Freedom is not the neutral 'and' between Evil and Good, but, in its concrete existence, the freedom of a living, finite human person, Evil itself, the pure form of Evil--this, perhaps, is what Schelling tried to conceal from himself by taking refuge in suspicious ideological formulas on the 'inversion of the natural relationship'....

p. 105: There, in these two versions of the 'and', resides the ultimate difference between Schelling and Hegel, as well as Schelling's crucial limitation: when Schelling asserts the irrational Ground of Logos as the indelible remainder of the primordial chaotic Thing which forever threatens to draw us back into its whirlpool--'What we call understanding, if it is real, living, active understanding, is really nothing but regulated madness. Understanding can manifest itself, show itself, only in its opposite, thus in what lacks understanding'--he is exposed to the permanent temptation of conceiving Ground and Logos, the Real and the Ideal principle, as complementary.

pp. 105-106: Hegel's effective position is far more disquieting: yes, in 'reconciliation', harmony is restored, but this 'new harmony' has nothing whatsoever to do with the restitution of the lost original harmony--in the new harmony, the loss of the original harmony is consummated. That is to say, the shift from utter 'perversion' to restored harmony concerns principally the notional standards by means of which we measure the 'perversion': it occurs when the subject abandons the (old) standard according to which the new state of things appeared to him 'perverted', and accepts a standard appropriate to the new constellation--as Hegel repeats again and again, when a state of things no longer fits its notion (its normative ground), the endeavor to bring this state of things back into harmony with its notion is vain: one has to change the notion itself.

Schelling claims that the fact of freedom opens up the possibility of Evil as the reversal of the 'normal' relationship between Logos and its contractive Ground: Ground can prevail upon the Light of Reason and, instead of remaining in the (back)ground, directly posit itself as the dominant principle of the Whole. For Hegel, however, this reversal is the very definition of subject: 'subject' is the name for the principle of Selfhood which subordinates to itself the substantial Whole whose particular moment it originally was. The reversal is therefore always-already the reversal of reversal itself: not in the sense that the subject has to abandon his 'egotistic pride', his central position, and again posit himself as the subordinate moment of a higher substantial Whole--what he has to abandon is the very standard of the substantial Whole which reduces him to a subordinated moment; instead, the subject has to raise a new, subjective Totality to the measure of 'normalcy'.

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).