The Indivisible Remainder (30)

From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, byAdrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), pp. 201-202:

Briefly examining some remarks contained in The Parallax View (2006) will help make sense of the conclusion Žižek draws in the final paragraphs of The Indivisible Remainder (the 1996 book that ends with the essay "Quantum Physics with Lacan") regarding the philosophical connection between his musings about quantum physics and German idealist conceptions of human freedom. Revisiting his 1996 reflections on this topic almost a decade later, he asks, "Is not the shift from substantial Reality to (different forms of) Event one of the defining features of modern sciences?" and, in response to this question, again emphasizes that "quantum physics posits as the ultimate reality not some primordial elements but, rather, a kind of string of 'vibrations,' entities which can only be described as desubstantialized processes" (Žižek 2006, 165)--or, as he reiterates this later in the same text, "the lesson of quantum physics" is that "solid material reality" isn't the most elementary and fundamental grounding layer of natural substance. Soon after repeating his insistence that quantum physics points to a matter deprived of any philosophically traditional image or notion of materiality, Žižek frames the contemporary difference between idealism and materialism thus:

It is here, in this terrain, that we should locate today's struggle between idealism and materialism: idealism posits an ideal Event which cannot be accounted for in the terms of its material (pre)conditions, while the materialist wager is that we can get "behind" the event and explore how Event explodes out of the gap in/of the order of Being (Žižek 2006, 166)

The Indivisible Remainder (29)

From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, by Adrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), pp. 200-201:

In Žižek's eyes, there is a Hegelian lesson to Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle. Instead of reading this principle in a Kantian fashion (i.e., the irreducible, unavoidable effect of the observer on the observed establishes a barrier or limit preventing direct observational access to the pure physical Real as it exists unsullied by the interference of observation), Žižek prefers to pull the dialectical trick of transubstantiating an obstacle blocking access to the Thing into the very Thing itself. From this perspective, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle represents (in perhaps a quite loose and metaphorical way) the Hegelian-Žižekian ontological proposition that subject is not separate from substance. Rather, subject is substance staring back at itself; the eye of the observing individual, an eye forming a part of the universe it sees, is, in a certain sense, the universe casting a glance over itself. The subject is that part of substance carrying out the self-objectification of substance, a self-objectification in which substance transforms itself. More specifically, with this example from quantum physics, Žižek contends that subjectivity's effect on the particles it observationally reflects upon isn't a matter of Kantian style external reflection either remaining confined within its own reality apart from material nature of introducing falsifying distortions into the field of Real being. On the contrary, the reflection of subjectivity, rather than being wholly external to what it observes, is inscribed directly into the ontological structure of the Real being of material nature itself. In other words, the refraction of the object by the subject's gaze isn't simply just subjective interference; this refraction is (also) a facet of the object's own essence.

The Indivisible Remainder (28)

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.

The Indivisible Remainder (24)

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.