What would it mean to say that this gap can only be articulated symbolically, that is at the discursive plane? Zizek’s attempt in this text is to present the logic of the signifier which he detects operating in Hegel, rescuing him as it were from claims of panlogicism.
Along these lines we are presented the argument regarding how a phenomenon bears within it the seed of its own negation. Capitalism, a society characterised by the expropriation of the majority of procedures, ushers in via class struggle its negation - a society where the expropriators are themselves expropriated in service to the commons.
The logic of the signifier alluded to earlier appears to be turning on the minimal difference enunciated between, what one wants to say, what one means, and what one effectively says. A difference which as you can imagine is subject to interpretability. Yet the interpretation which seems to be in question is not really contextual as you may expect. Rather it is a difference immanent to the subject.
In the subsequent section on Zeno’s paradoxes we are presented with an interpretive scene, or site where we can actually see how the old paradoxes perform the perplexity of repetition itself, the most telling sign of the psychoanalytic operation of the drive at work. We are told that the true aim of a drive ‘is not its stated goal: it is nothing more than “the return into the circuit of the drive.”
An investigation into the drive as such yields paradoxical, though perhaps esoteric movements: such as constituting the field of philosophy by omitting the object a.
Yet, is it not possible inasmuch as I do gather from these psychoanalytical investigations into drive; that these chimerial semblances and paradoxes appear because what is sought is the relation of the subject to the object cause of desire? But what else could we possibly hope to study? If not the law via which this relation is replicated. A law which cannot be a law as such because replicating the object cause can in no case guarantee the appearance of desire as such; just as the presence of the subject does not necessarily yield or disclose its object cause.
But to ask the properly perverted question here, what would this mean with respect to the paradoxes of Zeno? In dialectics there is a certain loss as it were that is itself interpreted as truth, and central to this point of view.
The arrow which is fired and at motion can for instance, through its journey be identified as the same arrow only if its dimensions, length etc. are the same. Zeno’s reasoning guides us to see that in verifying this we loose our capacity to notice the movement of the arrow, that may soon be making its mark. Motion here dissolves into discreteness - yet the observation that Zizek is making is that it is precisely in the tarrying - that is in the human experience of grasping such a loss that our aspect of the truth resides. An aspect which some may call dialectical.
To present this in Hegelese for instance would mean to say that the aspect of motion that we notice in the flight of the arrow exists only ‘for us’. ‘In itself’, the arrow remains in the same moment, even if its velocity is not the same at the same moment.
Zizek points out however that this distinction, between the thing ‘in itself’, and the thing ‘for us’ - is already a distinction that exists only in consciousness. In fact this may be Hegel’s most elementary criticism of Kant.
This is not a rejection of consciousness or subjectivity for that matter; for us - as Zizek explains - ‘the entire content of being resides in the argumentative path that brought us to it. Unchanging being as it were (if that is what we arrive at) is only a fixed objectification.
In a moment of strange parallelism with eastern esotericism we find that what we initially found to be a procedure or path external to the object, is already the object itself.
In Zizek’s own words, and contrary to classical representation of an external form obscuring the true content, the dialectical approach sees content itself as a ‘fetish’. Or better yet, as an objective whose inert presence hides its true form.
In the place of this nothingness we have a new formalism as it were. Not merely the perhaps familiar to politicians at least; that the dialectical truth of an object consists in its network of mediations, but what is the correlate of this passage of the object - its irrevocable loss.
Formally, what is changing here in terms of our understanding of knowledge is perhaps describable as a withering away of a correspondence theory; where thought for instance may correspond with its object, to be replaced by the triadic thought, concept and object. Here, concept is defined as the form of the thought, or better yet - as the truth of the content.
A prevalent enough opinion, even within departments of literature, and here I do mean perhaps in their earlier and more creatively enthusiastic days, is that criticism does not necessarily make something new; and while such a perspective may not be particularly engaged, it can often act as a mechanism which prevents a prospective reader to be able to reach the root of the matter in the first place, to decipher the map so to speak.
Perhaps it is not surprising then that we have, for the part of dialectical criticism at least in recent years the claim that it in fact makes history. But what is the mechanism that may be in reference to? Slavoj Zizek seems to name it the retroactive performative.
To adequately represent how this dimension may be approached however - we are provided a brief survey of the function of language to inquiry. Zizek readily admits that language may always be excessive, a surplus, perhaps functioning as a sanctioning agent, yet like that superlative gesture itself, its removal entails the loss of the thing itself. To put it in rather old English terms, it is that which secures a principle.
This, coupled with the earlier assertion, that it is knowledge itself that forms an object, may indicate as to what may be the scope of our inquiry here.
Where I personally may be less familiar with these categorisations is the assertion that Kant somehow remained within the opposition between subject and substance, whereas with Hegel we reach substance itself as subject. To put this section in the problematic terms of its Marxian successors - it is not that historical materialism is objective knowledge. Perhaps tautologically, the historical role of the proletariat requires the subjective position of the proletariat.
In philosophy, the discipline which tarries most persistently with sensory human experience is phenomenology - and we may be tempted to hazard the implicature, following the example cited from ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’, that the presentation of antagonistic moments in the unhappy consciousness as it were do not prefigure the absolute, but in their enunciation already express it: this hastened prefiguration may be read again as eulogy to the idea of patience. This eulogy would not recognize however that in presenting, that is in the feeling and expression of the antagonism as such, unhappy consciousness already depicts the gap between itself and the absolute.
In much of analytical thought, let alone dialectical reasoning the question of the place of contingency is raised in many forms, often against charges of determinism that are levelled. This is a lesson as it were, demonstrating - that the only way we get out of the circle of deductive reasoning is by positing contingency itself as necessary. But how does Hegel do this? We should claim that this is done via positing a site which is not totalised by the whole in question, perhaps a site from which this whole can be observed: put simply - perhaps the site of subjectivity itself.
There is another way in which we are led to this - the Hegelian maxim that the real is the rational, should not be read as ‘all that is real is rational, but rather there is no thing of the real that is not rational. This way of totalising the proposition allows us to see that without its constitutive exception, perhaps the very site of subjectivity itself - all (or perhaps nothing) is not rational.
What escapes conceptual deduction here is contingency itself. The question we must ask here is what is this contingency for the subject in question - which is to say for consciousness, predicating it as it were or in other words temporalising it, which may indeed be noticing how it was contingent in the first place, like for instance a retroactive evaluation drawn from experience.
It may also be possible to read in these pages an account of why Kant had to think the dichotomy between phenomenon (or things as they appear to us) and noumenon (or things in themselves) in the first place. Were contingency to be what consciousness requires to sufficiently grasp or come to terms with, in other words, were the principal contradiction to be between an imperium of ordered consciousness and the incalculable contingency of happenstance; then we would effectively be positing that it is this contingency that is essential.
I am not sure here, and I ask this as a well meaning question as I have not read the book - is Quentin Meillasoux’s ‘After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency’, published in 2006 in any way engaging with or an advocacy of such a position? Because its title does sound like it, and despite being told not to judge a book by its cover, I as a Hegelian am often taken up by appearances.
The comparison which is made by Zizek himself however, so as to better place this before the table of the history of philosophy; is to take what his apparent advocacy of an indifferent disposition to contingency may mean when compared to perhaps a better known position that may be resembling it - that is that of Stoicism, which too regards the contingency, or rather the contingent course of the world with indifference.
We are reminded that Hegel himself takes Stoicism to be an example of the unhappy consciousness that is ‘unable to alienate itself as particular content, leading to, as it were the abstracted individual.
For Hegel, we are told - ethical duty always is dictated by the historical situation of the Polis. Antigone is provided as an example from classical literature who perhaps embodies the pathological or indeed hysterical insistence on particularity as the cornerstone of her ethical edifice. A tragedy I would advice you to read on your own.
The retroactive performative, were we to read this critical gesture against the backdrop of its most stringent and contemporary critique: namely the charge levelled by Derrida that it is perhaps the most grandiose form of the metaphysics of presence, must be read with this insight regarding how its contingency came to be necessary. “The key for the Hegelian teleology would… be to search inside the retroactive moment of the signifier, for the point at which the appearance of a new master signifier retroactively bestows signification upon the chain that preceded it.” Perhaps not unlike the emergence of a theme in a literary movement, or the turn of a narrative in a plot.
The centrality of this reading to Zizek’s account of dialectics is not to be understated, for he goes on to stress that the “dialectic is, in its essence, the science of ‘how necessity emerges from contingency.’ What cannot be accounted for deductively is the emergence of S itself, as the agent who retroactively frames or orients a discourse. The emergence may only be gleaned, induced, interpreted etc. in an attempt to determine its real causality.
Even at the level of gesture in its performative dimension, such as in drama, we are pointed out to Brecht whose strategy of defamiliarization, the patented concept of the alienation effect represents when not actively depicting how that which is natural must always appear to be a totally contingent, fictional order.
Is not a perfectly laid out plot - that great ultimate mask of contingency itself? Like a planned event or a show trial whose end is already known in advance as it were? Yet even for such a scripted event to work, let us say the point in a mystery where the culprit is caught - staging the contingency of this happening is everything. In other words, for things to work - it is the contingency itself that is necessary.
The aspect of contingency as it were may perhaps tokenistically be represented in a constitutional monarchy for example such as is Great Britain.
The monarch as such, as a simply titular authority, whose word - while not constituting - for which there may be a parliament chosen according to competencies, does enfranchise a decree paradoxically also serves as a safety valve between symbolic authority and actual competence, whose fusion we are often reminded leads to the kind of bureaucratic authoritarianism which the Stalinist period perhaps yet serves as the best example.
The republican hatred for the king however, must find its structural corollary and the constitutional safeguard against this is ‘in keeping the greatest possible distance between symbolic legitimation and effective authority; relegating the position of the master as it were to a point rejected from the Whole.’ Now as comical as this may sound - do we really live in a world that is very different? It may be possible to find a sense of solidarity for oneself in the kingdom by simply cursing the monarch under one’s breath, further the extent of a President’s distance from nuclear launch codes is a matter probably known only to the joint chiefs of staff, even if it is him who has the final word on the matter.
The author indeed draws a parallel between what Hegel may be implying along these lines, to what Lacan says in ‘The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.’ That the gulf between a monarch and the state bureaucracy corresponds, if not is mapped by the gulf between bureaucratic know how and the quilting point in a discourse. Despite its authority, it is bureaucratic discourse which requires this quilting point to authorise its discourse. Totalising it from the outside, shouldering the moment of decision, etc. And lending to its performative dimension.
We are also warned that were this estimate point to fail “bureaucratic knowledge” would become crazed, perhaps even seeming malevolent. Arriving as it were before the rule of a totalitarian bureaucracy. These become traceable via the logic of the signifier, attesting to the necessity of this position.
So what would an example of such a quilting point be? We are provided one from Racine’s Athaliah when Joad answers, I fear god and no one else. This is not metonymy as much as the surturing of a name to a designative function in discursive relations, and in another light not principally different from the fact that combining features allows us to minimise the number of instruments. How today smart phones combine the features of a camera, telephone and gaming console for example. Yet, this is also similar to the manner in which most scapegoats are made with Jews, Muslim, racial minorities etc. serving as examples. The example which is referred to in the text however has a more nominative universal function, an instance where one stands in for all the others - even if it were fear of god, which paradoxically in what it substitutes for proves that it is no fear at all, or perhaps as Lacan may put it - the opposite of a fear.
The author’s notes on the parallels between the Dreyfus affair and Paulinian Christianity are worth reading for their sheer involved depiction, which does much to warm up the rather cold theoretical notes.
The lesson however, if I may yet venture to find one - lies in the quest for justice itself and the machinations of its transgressions often contained in it. This is likened as it were to the Hegelian negation of the negation. We have the law, and we have a multitude of its transgressions. The romance of the grey detective amidst the criminals pots and pans resides in the fact that in representing/upholding the law - he champions civilisation itself, leaving to the thieves and burglars ‘the respectability of apes and wolves’, as Chesterton puts it.’ This opens the way for the only true adventure, the only true negativity which is the law itself.
The construction, if that is a provocative term, of the self-deployed here is worth taking note of because it actually confronts the chief criticism of Derridean deconstruction on its own terms, that is in the dialectic of identity and difference. What would it mean for instance when Derrida writes about a Hegelianism without reserve? Is this interpretable, as some may; as a negation without sublation? The representation of the dialectic of identity and difference is one which notices the pass from identity to difference, and some may add - even in fundamental terms; ie. when a master signifier of a discourse changes, yet once this difference is pushed to the point of self-difference, it is difference in its genericity that is recuperated by identity. To quote Zizek - “This reading misses the decisive point of the dialectical movement. It is not difference which ends up being reduced to the self-movement of identity, but identity which is reduced to absolute, which is to say self-referential difference.” I read this as not fundamentally dissimilar to encountering a change and accounting for it, and perhaps in viewing or indeed reading how these interpretive strategies have been put to use in the academies would be instructive as to what they may have tried to explain. Deconstruction most frequently deployed in reading fiction, sought to present the textual underpinnings and unsaid lacunae’s that sustain the illusion of a fiction. Dialectics in having to adapt to this difference sought to account for the desire for a fiction by reading circumstantial which is to say historical forces that may be influential or when not directly determinative of the form of a text.
To put it in other terms what we see is the difference between a film critic who explains an ambiguity in the narrative which the plot exploits via referencing cuts in the shot, compared to one who tries to explain why a shot had to be composed as such for two scenes to fit - hence producing a narrative. I am reminded here of Peter Dews’ book on the topic published in 1987 titled ‘Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, a year after Zizek’s own work.’
In any case I think it would be important to take into account Zizek’s own position on this given that his reading of the dialectic may not be as self-evidently exemplary or even compositionally the same as Fredrik Jameson’s for example. “Identity, is the name for difference taken to its point of self-reference.” I think the import of this claim in how it seeks to address if not recuperate crime is significant: crime is not recuperated in the self-movement of the Law, reduced to a subordinated moment of its self-mediation…” But is not, or rather has not the dialectical temptation, the very idea of progress not hung on precisely such a moment of a sublationary realisation of the law via its mediation through the aberrant particularity of crime? This is where Zizek would answer ‘no’ - insofar as it is the law itself, whose unthought as it were, its own pre-history that supposes the division and ownership of property to begin with. This is how “it is the truth of law itself, that it is nothing more than crime universalised.”
This mediation, dialectical as it is deserves particular attention for it is not a discrepancy between certain elements in a text but between the elements and their background - and what it appears to them as, and perhaps it is only through this way that we may yet redeem the possibility of a law which actualises itself through its self-mediation by crime.
Yet what would an actualisation of law via its self-mediation by crime even mean if not an explication of the thinking behind Hegel’s attack on the Aristotelian law of identity?
Zizek attempts to explicate this for us via a historical reading of Marx’s notebooks on The Class Struggle in France where we can see a universal splitting with its specific contents. The Orleanists and the Legitimists (ie. those who supported the descendants of the younger brother of Louis XIV and those who supported the king himself) were both on the face of it royalists, yet their alliance in the ‘Party of Order’ had to be republican, for it was the only way both factions could maintain equal power over common class interests, without giving up their mutual rivalry.
This argument is put in biological terms thus: the republicans would be a species inside the royalist genus… yet Zizek adds ‘that it would serve as the genus itself for the species that are subsumed within ‘the genus’. Which is this last concluding genus then? The republican or the royalist?
But in following the argument presented, if the choice which a royalist is faced with is between Orleanism and Legitimism, can he be a Republican? The answer we see is if he chooses the medium itself, placing himself as it were at their intersection. This, following the thread would be where a royalist meets a royalist.
This as it is does not exhaust how the universal itself is recognized as it were, let alone categorised or identified in particularities. We would require to think the universal as an exception. An exception to be recognized would require the identification of a difference. The difference Zizek is referring to however is not that between elements and their background, referred to earlier, rather it is between the ensemble (that is the elements and their background) and a particular element. This, he claims is what allows for an ensemble itself to be placed at the level of its own elements, or as Zizek puts it - as the paradoxical element that is lacking, that is absence itself.
When such an element is absent however, amidst a differential network of signifiers, we must consider such an absence as part of the signifier in question.
What may it mean to think an absence as part of the signifier in question? One way of doing so would be to think its place of inscription, or perhaps would be inscription, for absence would hence also mark a signifier in difference from itself.
As a feature of the Hegelian dialectic, Zizek does identify a characteristic, that is he insists that the universal has just one particular, or as in the case with humans, has just one species. What this would mean hence is that specific differences would coincide with the difference between the genus and the species.
I am tempted here to present how the particular emerges from the universal but would encourage you to read Zizek’s original which I believe may very easily be read as an allegory of the familial situation, even if there are other ways of doing so. What would remain consistent however is the antagonism between these two levels. This may indeed be another way of reading why Marx argued for the coincidence of republicanism as the only way to sanctify or totalise (if it amounts to the same thing) a royalism. This is how the scission is on the side of the universal and not on the side of the particular. The universal also, it can be deduced - expresses itself in that element of the particular which is abstracted from it in the act of scission as it embodies the universal. The force of the desire which animates this is an example of sexual difference. Another would be in the remainder introduced by that non-totalizeable category of women, particularly once an element has been excluded that begins to function ‘as the immediate embodiment of the human: ie man. If this (new) Woman does not exist, then man is a woman pretending to exist.’ A rather brilliant summary of many a contrived and contriving mating ritual, when not pretext for other developments. Not to mention the secret of the game of masquerades and many a Shakespearean plot.
With respect to the species hence, man would be and represent a moment of scission within a field of non-differentiated feminine collectivity, simultaneously embodying however, as its polarity: the moment of its universality.
We are presented here with two forms of reading, which is to say kinds of interpretation that misrecognize what is happening here, believing as it were that such a difference is reducible to a specific difference against the backdrop of the universality of the genus’, when it in fact constitutes this universality.
This indeed is what perhaps was later popularised by Althusser as the concept of overdetermination. Zizek however finds a quotation from Marx himself where at the very least the intuition of this category can be cognized - “in all forms of society there is at least one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialised within it.” - From the introduction to the Grundrisse. This characterisation of overdetermination as it were, of All by one if its elements, ‘that according to the order of classification, is only supposed to play a subordinate role’… is indeed what has been being described - and perhaps it would be instructive for me here to go back and read Althusser’s initial critique of Hegel, and perhaps figure as to why he felt the need to.
In any case: overdetermination - in Marx as in Althusser comes to define: ‘that paradoxical particular that is part of the structure but at the same time structures the entire structure. Marx himself when accounting for the totality of production, distribution, exchange and consumption assigns the place of primacy - that is the overdetermining aspect to that of production.
What Zizek emphasises however - which is perhaps the more Hegelian reading of it, just as he offers a criticism is that the universal aspect, or that capable of overdetermination would encounter itself only oppositionally - that is in the domain of the particular; and really the self-encounter, which earlier Zizek insisted would necessarily be missed is not very Hegelian inasmuch as Zizek seems to be referring to another mode of production, and as such not a self-encounter but an encounter with and other, or as Lacan may put it - with an Other - that is another symbolic order or constitutive logic. Why is this not Hegelian however? Because Hegel’s moments: which arise from his syllogisms in a way that has been compared to crescendos in a symphony by Beethoven - are very much explicitly self-referential, inasmuch as they are composed of the argument presented elsewhere. What makes them capable of producing ideas that strike us with alterity however is via the very progress of negation which each proposition grapples with in his logic. The moments hence, which also frame section of the book - his Phenomenology, are not mere summations but also breaks - radical ones, like the fall of an idea which is perhaps weirdly translated into ‘inspiration’ in English from Einfall, mark as it were the points where thought simply could not go on in its newly self recognized mode; in whose very articulation we hear the bell of its passing.
The subject itself (whether the bildungsroman of consciousness as for Hegel or the appropriation and distribution of Capital as for Marx) presents itself in a peculiarly marked structure. “The particular is both lacking, without enough of it to fill the extension of the universal, yet also at the same time, excessive, overabundant and superfluous because it always adds itself as the surplus element that plays the role of the universal itself.
The way in which Zizek presents and hence redefines the concept of overdetermination however, that is as a sexual difference whose particularity totalises the backdrop of the genus means that any possibility of a closure of the short circuiting, where the universal and the particular end up on the same side, a classification without remainder would mean we are dealing with a ‘flat objective structure, without any representation of the subject. The subject for Zizek, and one which I would be happy to advocate and endorse is one which properly ontologizes sexual difference - a phrase he would come to adopt in later years, probably as an outcome of some of his debates with Judith Butler.
I often think that it is not adequately appreciated just how seriously this ontological dimension is emphasised by Zizek regarding sexuality. Without this for instance we may well be able to see a case where republicanism can legitimately represent a royalism to other royalisms: invisibleizing as such the dialectic of lack and excess which animates their economy in the first place. Also, to aid any given reading here - it is possible for instance to sexualise nothingness itself, observe - “The surplus - Particular is the negative embodiment of the Universal; it fills the lack, the Void, the deficiency of the Particular in regard to the Universal (and here I must add that I am tempted to read the universal as a field). The surplus, the excess, is therefor the form which lack takes, and it is only at this point that it becomes legitimate to introduce the formula of the subject.”
Such a non-substantive definition of the subject as it were, defined via negativa has yet to face up to the substantiality of the self, and here it is essential that we not confuse a trait for the subject; for the former may be substantive even when the latter is not.
But would not a valid objection here be that the inherence of a trait substantialises the subject? Again no - this is because even the absence of the trait operates at the level of the trait ie. it is that which is absent. Zizek describes the form of mediation in question to be a kind of ‘pulsation’, for it is this absence where precisely universality breaks through.
I suppose that the far more interesting question to some would be - may a trait be solicited, and I suppose this makes dialectical thought and the ability to mediate them all the more vital.
There is another, perhaps more vital reason as to why the trait and its lack have to be placed on the same field as it were of S (signifier) as $ for there would be no reason to progress to another signifier without it.
A purpose or rather a possible purpose to think universality as exception, even were it to be the emptiness of a subject - a subject without predicates as it were would be to represent the element of its exception to other elements.
This also allows Zizek to present the thesis of a tautological god, which he identifies with the Judeo-Christian tradition as his candidate for the only one.
In a gesture which would foreground the work of Deleuze favourably; even as it takes up arms against it; Zizek posits the beginning of the dialectical process as not an abundance of self-sufficient substance, tautologically identical with itself but rather ‘absolute contradiction’. Though as apposed to a naive Hegelian reading which would take this as a positing of conceptual difference with itself; leading to perhaps the recognition or perhaps naming of a new moment. Zizek, in this text published in 1986 under the supervision of Miller seemingly does take in his stride more contemporary criticism which points out how Hegel in his thinking of the conceptual difference produced in an encounter, or that which may be apparent between two moments cannot think the concept of difference as such. Yet were we, following the thread presented here, to treat dialectics as beginning with contradiction rather than identity, just as we tried to show the Hegelian critique of the law of identity, analogously to how we have attempted to represent the law as crime universalized, it would be circumspect to observe that a concept of difference without negation does not seem to be able to attest as to what it is different from. Do we have for instance, in Deleuze an ontology which can seemingly glide on a virtual plane of differentiality whose repetition does elicit negation because of the subject as it were, that seemingly takes on new characteristics to traverse this plane, presenting to our gaze hence what he may term a transcendental empiricism? This may be a question which is taken up for itself, in a matter addressed exclusively.
Though not to play the spoil sport, I should add that Zizek’s reading (and his prose) on conceptual production and the possibility, seemingly impossible, of framing all becoming by representing as it were, their conditions of possibility - is perhaps the ontological gesture par excellence: and I would recommend that you read this section yourself.
We may yet have to move on from a concept (or conceptual?) of production in a transcendental empiricism, to that much drier though perhaps better ordered nominalistic world - where a thing (which may even be an entity) is less a constituent of its constituent characteristics, than it is its name - that signifying mark which seals the representational aspect under a single denominating feature.
Negation as it were - or perhaps I should say even negation, has meaning ie. is a semblant when it is recognized: as a piece of work, it for itself represents what it may be for others - as a commodity for example. A relation, which seemingly always has more to with ownership and trade than Das Ding An Sich. In itself - the practice of its making; and that which results from solidities, potentials, temporal aspects that are hard to discern from the cool distance of a show floor, even as they appeal to such possibilities.
At any rate I should break off my notes here - having covered the first three chapters in Zizek’s doctoral thesis.
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