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From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, by Adrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), p. 200:

When Žižek speaks of the void, what he sometimes has in mind is an intangible web of virtual possibilities (akin to the fleeting and ethereal domain of microscopic quantum events and processes) that becomes a fully constituted reality (i.e., created material nature as per vulgar philosophical conceptions of macroscopic matter) if and when the symmetrical balance of this web is disturbed through one virtual possibility being endowed with greater weight than the others. The virtuality of possibility thereby "collapses" into the reality of actuality. But what prompts the collapse of this intangible virtual web? What catalyzes the falling out of something (i.e., the reality of actuality as substantial being with material heft) from nothing (i.e., the virtuality of possibility as an insubstantiality within substantial being more than substantial being itself)? Here is where things obviously reconnect with the Hegelian topic of the rapport between substance and subject.

The Indivisible Remainder (27)

From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, by Adrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), pp. 195-6:

In the spirit of the later Schelling (as per the half-told theosophical tale of the Weltalter drafts), Žižek employs a grand metaphor of cosmic proportions to describe what transpires at the smaller scale of ontogenetic subject formation. Bringing this, so to speak, back down to earth, one can read these remarks as condensing a series of concepts and themes already encountered here. Two of these conceptual-thematic threads are especially important: first, the processes of subjectification are set in motion when loopholes or short circuits generated by conflicts within substance prompt or support contractive investments into operators of subjectification; and second, these operators of subjectification, in their function as concrete universals, introduce an asymmetrical ordering of the field of phenomena, an unbalanced new synthesis of reality. And, as Žižek repeatedly emphasizes, this established "new order" of reality always can be destroyed by the subject which created it, since the negativity of $ isn't ever entirely sublated by the subjectifying orders it establishes. (This negativity, as a set of virtual potentialities perpetually ready to break out of Imaginary-Symbolic systems through the events of acts, haunts the actuality of every Imaginary-Symbolic system.)

On The Indivisible Remainder (26)

The following is excerpted from original article by Tony Myers available at:

http://www.lacan.com/zizekchro1.htm

Reading Schelling via Lacan

Once the Lacanian concepts of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are grasped, Zizek, in philosophical writings such as his discussion of Schelling, always interprets the work of other philosophers in terms of those concepts. This is so because "the core of my entire work is the endeavour to use Lacan as a privileged intellectual tool to reactualize German idealism". (The Zizek Reader) The reason Zizek thinks German idealism (the work of Hegel, Kant, Fichte and Schelling) needs reactualizing is that we are thought to understand it in one way, whereas the truth of it is something else. The term "reactualizing" refers to the fact that there are different possible ways to interpret German idealism, and Zizek wishes to make "actual" one of those possibilities in distinction to the way it is currently realized.

At its most basic, we are taught that German idealism believes that the truth of something could be found in itself. For Zizek, the fundamental insight of German idealism is that the truth of something is always outside it. So the truth of our experience lies outside ourselves, in the Symbolic and the Real, rather than being buried deep within us. We cannot look into our selves and find out who we truly are, because who we truly are is always elsewhere. Our selves are somewhere else in the Symbolic formations which always precede us and in the Real which we have to disavow if we are to enter the Symbolic order.

The reason that Lacan occupies a privileged position for Zizek's lies in Lacan's proposition that self-identity is impossible. The identity of something, its singularity or "oneness", is always split. There is always too much of something, and indivisible remainder, or a bit left-over which means that it cannot be self-identical. The meaning of a word, i.e., can never be found in the word itself, but rather in other words, its meaning therefore is not self-identical. This principle of the impossibility of self-identity is what informs Zizek's reading of the German idealists. In reading Schelling, i.e., the Beginning is not actually the beginning at all - the truth of the Beginning lies elsewhere, it is split or not identical to itself.

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, 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. (The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters)

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'Complementarity' as parallax view

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. 211: The uncertainty principle is actually much 'stronger': far from concerning merely the limitation of the observer, its point is, rather, that complementarity is inscribed into the the 'thing itself'--a particle itself, in its 'reality', cannot have a fully specified mass and momentum, it can have only one or the other. The principle is thus profoundly 'Hegelian': what first appeared to be an epistemological obstacle turns out to be a property of the thing itself; that is to say, the choice between mass and momentum defines the very 'ontological' status of the particle. This inversion of an epistemological obstacle into an ontological 'impediment' which prevents the the object from actualizing the totality of its potential qualities (mass and momentum) is 'Hegelian'.

And this is what 'complementarity' is about: two complementary properties do not complement each other , they are mutually exclusive.

p. 212: On a somewhat different level, this is what Heidegger is aiming at when he insists again and again that true philosophical deliberation is not only 'of no practical use' but can even hurt our 'practical efficiency': a scientist, for example, if he is to be efficient in his particular domain, must not 'think', that is, reflect upon the ontological horizon of pre-comprehension which discloses this domain--therein resides one of the dimensions, an often misrecognized one, of 'ontological difference'.

p. 214: The trap to be avoided here is the reduction of this theme of complementarity to the now-fashionable critique of universalism and the related assertion of the plurality of particular narratives: complementarity--conceived as the impossibility of the complete description of a particular phenomenon--is, on the contrary, the very place of the inscription of universality into the Particular. A particular social phenomenon can never be completely 'contextualized', reduced to a set of sociohistorical circumstances--such a particularization would presuppose the crudest universalism: namely, the presumption that we, its agents, can speak from a neutral-universal place of pure meta-language exempt from any specific context.

Within the social-symbolic field, each particular totality, in its very self-enclosure, (mis)perceives itself as universal, that is to say, it comprises itself and its own perspective on its Outside, on all other particular totalities (epochs, societies, etc.)--why? Precisely because it is in itself incomplete, 'open', not wholly determined by circumstances. It is this very overlapping of two deficiencies (or, in Lacanese: the intersection of the two lacks) that opens up the dimension of universality.

p. 215: We can now see where, precisely, the Hegelian approach to universality differs from the standard one: the standard approach is concerned with the historicist problem of the effective scope of a universal notion (is a notion truly universal, or is its validity actually constrained to a specific historical epoch, social class, etc.?), whereas Hegel asks exactly the opposite question: how, in what precise historical conditions, can a 'neutral' universal notion emerge at all?

p. 216: The properly Hegelian problem is not to ascertain that my particular (socialist, conservative, feminist...) brand of ecological orientation is just one species of the universal genus of ecological movements; the true problem is how, under what conditions, my own particular sociopolitical experience leads me to abandon the immediate identification of 'being an ecologist' with my particular brand of it, so that I apprehend the link that connects ecology in general with my particular orientation as contingent. The answer, of course, is provided by the notion of lack: only in so far as I experience my own particular position as fundamentally deficient does the universal dimension involved in (and obfuscated by) it appear as such--or, in Hegel's terms, it is 'posited' becomes 'for itself'.

p. 217: Along the same lines, one can also clarify the allegedly 'unhistorical' character of the Lacanian 'formulas of sexuation'. Every epoch, every society, every ethnic community, of course, furnishes its own ideological connotation of the difference between the sexes (in Europe, for example, 'man' is posited as the neutral universality of the human species, whereas 'woman' stands for the specific difference, i.e. for 'sexualization' as such; in Ancient China, on the contrary, 'woman' designated continuity and 'man' discontinuity, breach, separation). What the Lacanian 'formulas of sexuation' endeavor to formulate, however, is not yet another positive formulation of the sexual difference but the underlying impasse that generates the multitude of positive formulations as so many (failed) attempts to symbolize the traumatic real of the sexual difference. What all epochs have in common is not some universal positive feature, some transhistorical constant; what they all share, rather, is the same deadlock, the same antinomy--in Schelling's terms, one is tempted to say that this same impasse persists and repeats itself in different powers/potentials in different cultures.

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Hysteria/the Subject vs. Subjectivization

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. 163-165: Hysteria has to be comprehended in the complexity of its strategy, as a radically ambiguous protest against the Master's interpellation which simultaneously bears witness to the fact that the hysterical subject needs a Master, cannot do without a Master, so that there is no simple and direct way out. For that reason, one should also avoid the historicist pitfall of rejecting the notion of hysteria as belonging to a bygone era: the notion that today, borderline disturbances, not hysteria, are the predominant form of 'discontent' in our civilization. 'Borderline' is the contemporary form of hysteria, that is, of the subject's refusal to accept the predominant mode of interpellation whose agent is no longer the traditional Master but the 'expert knowledge' of the discourse of Science. In short, the shift from the classic form of hysteria to borderline disturbances is strictly correlative with the shift from the traditional Master to the form of Power legitimated by Knowledge.

A more than sufficient reason for maintaining the notion of hysteria is that the status of the subject as such is ultimately hysterical. That is to say, when Lacan asserts that the most succinct definition of the subject is 'that which is not an object', the apparent banality of this claim should not deceive us: the subject--in the precise psychoanalytic sense of the subject of desire--exists only in so far as the question remains open of what she is for the Other as an object, that is, I am a subject in so far as the radical perplexity persists as to the Other's desire, as to what the Other sees (and finds worthy of desire) in me. In other words, when Lacan claims that there is no desire without an object-cause, this does not amount to the banality according to which every desire is attached to its objective correlative: the 'lost object' which sets the subject's desire in motion is ultimately the subject herself, and the lack in question concerns her uncertainty as to her status for the Other's desire. In this precise sense, desire is always desire of the Other: the subject's desire is the desire to ascertain her status as the object of the Other's desire.

The status of the Lacanian 'Che vuoi?', 'What do you want?, is thus radically ambiguous. On the one hand, it emanates from the Other--that is to say, it stands for the question the big Other (the analyst) addresses to the (hysterical) subject whose desire is inconsistent and, as such, self-impeding: 'What do you actually want? Do you really want what you are saying you want?' On the other hand, 'Che vuoi?' articulates the perplexity of the subject himself confronted with an impenetrable Other who wants something from him, although the subject is never able to ascertain what this something actually is [....] I, the subject, never know what I really want, since the Other's desire remains forever an enigma to me....

That is the vicious circle of hysteria: on the one hand, hysteria is secondary, a reaction against interpellation, a failed interpellation, a rejection of the identity imposed on the subject by the predominant form of interpellation, a questioning of this identity ('Am I really what you're saying I am?'); at another, more fundamental level, however, hysteria is primary, it articulates the radical, constitutive uncertainty as to what, as an object, I am for the other; and the symbolic identity conferred on me by interpellation is a response, a way out of the deadlock of hysteria. In other words, one could say that hysteria expresses the feminine subject's refusal of the predominant patriarchal symbolic order, the questioning of the authority of the Name-of-the-Father; however, one should simultaneously assert that this symbolic paternal authority itself emerges in order to render invisible, to 'gentrify', the impasse of hysteria. Or--to put it even more pointedly--it is not that "Woman doesn't exist' because, on account of patriarchal 'repression' she is not allowed to express herself freely and constitute her full symbolic identity, but, rather, the other way around--patriarchal symbolic authority emerges in order to 'gentrify' the scandal of 'Woman doesn't exist', to constrain the feminine subject to a determinate place in the symbolic structure. [....] Lacan's 'Woman doesn't exist' means that, precisely, 'woman' cannot be constructed: 'woman' is an entity whose symbolic construction necessarliy fails, in opposition to 'man', who does exist--that is, who can be constructed (in the logical sense of the term, since there is a limit, an exception, which allows for this construction). Lacan's point, of course, is that this 'less' is 'more': the claim that 'woman' cannot be constructed equals the claim that the status of the subject is feminine--that which eludes logical construction, the reef of impossibility at which symbolic construction fails, is precisely the subject qua $, the lack of the signifying chain.

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Using Lacan to reactualize Hegelian dialectic

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. 143: Our first result, therefore, is that the act and the big Other, far from being simply opposed, are intertwined in a constitutive way: [....] the 'objectivity' of the big Other implies a redoubled 'subjective' reflection: I am what (I think that others think that I think that) I am.... This precise formulation also places an obstacle in the path of the 'humanist' misreading of the interdependence of the subject and the big Other: the point is not that the big Other (the symbolic structure) is 'always-already here', but incomplete, 'non-all', and that the subject somehow finds a niche of its own, a margin of freedom, in the inconsistencies and lacks of the big Other.

p. 144: [....] it is the very supplement of my 'subjective' act of decision (of precipitate identification) which changes the dispersed, 'non-all' collection of signifiers into the 'objective order of the big Other.

From a strictly Hegelian standpoint, the alternative between persisting in the solitude of the act which suspends the big Other and 'compromising one's desire' by accepting one's place in the big Other (the socio-symbolic order) is a false one, the last trap laid by abstract Understanding in order to prevent us from attaining true philosophical speculation. The ultimate speculative identity is the identity of the act and the Other: an authentic act momentarily suspends the big Other, but it is simultaneously the 'vanishing mediator' which grounds, brings into existence, the big Other. In other words, the proposition 'A is a' displays the precise structure of speculative judgement in which the identity of the two elements is mediated by a central impossibility: A, the big Other, the symbolic order, is inherently 'barred', hindered, structured around the void of a central impossibility; it always falls short of its notion; this central impossibility is its condition of possibility, and the objet a is precisely the paradoxical object which gives body to this impossibility, which is nothing but the materialization of this impossibility. In this precise sense, a is the object cause of desire: it does not effectively pre-exist desire as that which arouses it, it merely gives body to its inherent deadlock, to the fact that desire is never satisfied by any positive object; [....]

pp. 144-5: [....] the big Other is the field of supposed knowledge, that is, [....] it is strictly correlative to the effect of transference (in exactly the sense in which Kant claims that the moral law acquires actual existence only in the subject's respect for it). 'Transference' designates the subject's trust in the meaning-to-come: in the psychoanalytic cure, for example, the transferential relationship with the analyst bears witness to the patient's confidence that the analyst 'is in the know'--the analyst's presence is the guarantee that the patient's symptoms possess some secret meaning yet to be discovered. Consequently, in so far as the big Other functions as the guarantee of the meaning-to-come, the very fact of the big Other involves the subjective gesture of precipitation. In other words: how do we pass from the 'non-all', dispersed, inconsistent collection of signifiers to the big Other qua consistent order? By supplementing the inconsistent series of signifiers with a Master-Signifier, S1, a signifier of the pure potentiality of meaning-to-come; by this precipitation (the intervention of an 'empty' signifier which stands in for the meaning-to-come) the symbolic field is completed, changed into a closed order. Since, however, the transferential relationship is by definition dependent on a subject which is in itself divided/split, a subject which stands under the sign of lack and negativity (only such a dislocated subject has the urge to establish a support for itself in the big Other via the gesture of precipitate identification), this means that the big Other hinges on a divided/split subject. For that reason, the dissolution of transference (at the end of the psychoanalytic cure), the experience that 'the big Other doesn't exist', and 'subjective destitution' are strictly equivalent.

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Using Lacan to reactualize Hegelian dialectic

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. 139: The transcendence of the big Other qua substantial In-itself--that is, the order of 'objective spirit' which exists independently of the subject's activity--is therefore a kind of necessary perspective illusion; it is the form in the guise of which the subject (mis)perceives his very incapacity to attain the In-itself of the real other whose true intentions remain impenetrable. In this precise sense, the status of the spiritual Substance is virtual: what is virtual about the big Other is its very In-itself, that on account of which the big Other cannot be reduced to the intentions, meanings, psychical states, and so on, of effectively existing individuals.

p. 140: In other words, far from depending on a kind of minimal co-ordination individuals were able to reach in spite of the opacity of their true intentions, the spiritual Substance emerges as the way to avoid the impasse of this opacity by presupposing the co-ordination-of-intentions as already given in the purely virtual Third Order of impersonal rules, so that now the problem is no longer 'Do individuals truly understand each other?', but 'Does every individual follow the common rules?' In this precise sense, every human community is 'virtual': founded upon rules, values, and so on, whose validity is by definition presupposed, never conclusively proven--the status of the big Other is forever that of a semblance.

p. 140: [....] even if some notion was first imposed as a purely instrumental means of ideological deception, the moment the majority of the people fully accept this notion as the foundation of their social existence, we are no longer dealing with a lie but with the substantial truth of a community. [....]

p. 141: This 'magic' reversal of an 'error' into the founding gesture of co-operation can also occur in the opposite direction, 'backwards': in the course of the disintegration of an 'organic' community into egotistic individualism [....]

And again, the crucial point is that this structural impossibility of verifying the rules or intentions which underlie our socio-symbolic activity, this undecidability between error and co-operation, is the positive condition of genuine co-operation: the moment we invest another subject with the capacity to possess and determine the rules which control the true meaning of our speech, we no longer participate in genuine symbolic co-operation, since we conceive ourselves as a pure instrument manipulated by those who control the rules of the game. In this case, the symbolic order loses its virtual status--that is the most succinct definition of paranoia. Let us recall the reference to Nation: Nation is an 'open' notion; no subject controls its 'true meaning'; and, for that very reason, it can serve as the frame for genuine co-operation, that is, as the substance of our social being, not a mere deceptive ploy manipulated by the rulers in order to control and exploit their subordinates.

We are effectively dealing with 'spiritual Substance' when a notion which was originally imposed as a means of ideological deception and manipulation unexpectedly escapes the control of its creator and starts to lead a life of its own. [....]

p. 142: Therein resides the fundamental enigma of the symbolic community: how is it possible to perform this sleight of hand constitutive of the symbolic order, this deceitful presentation of what is yet to come as already given? Lacan provides a precise answer: the presupposed co-ordination concerns not the level of the signified (of some shared positive content) but the level of the signifier. The undecidability with regard to the signified (do others really intend the same as me?) converts into an exceptional signifier, the empty Master-Signifier, the signifier-without-signified. 'Nation', 'Democracy', 'Socialism', and other Causes stand for that 'something' about which we are never sure what, exactly, it is--the point is, rather, that by identifying with Nation we signal our acceptance of what others accept, with a Master-Signifier which serves as the rallying point for all the others. In other words, identification with such an empty Master-Signifier is, in its most basic dimension, identification with the very gesture of identification. We can now see in what precise sense the status of the signifier as such is virtual: virtuality is the virtuality of the signified, that is, the signifier relies on a 'meaning to come' which, although it is never fully actualized, functions as if it is already effective. When the signifier 'our nation' starts to function as the rallying point for a group of people, it effectively co-ordinates their activity, although each of them may have a different notion of what 'our Nation' means.