Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1.The Madness of the Symbolic

2.Grasping the Vanishing Mediator Between the Real and the Ideal

3.Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Transcendental Subjectivity

4.The Problem of Nature in the Lacanian Subject

5.Kant, Todestrieb, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle

6.From Transcendental Philosophy to Substance as Subject

7.The Logic of Transcendental Materialism

8.When the World Opens its Eyes

9.The Abyss of Unconscious Decision

10.Radicalizing the Subject

11.From Radical Idealism to Critical Metaphysics

12.The Deadlocks of Ontological Catastrophe

Bibliography

To the Memory of Joey Basha

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to two people without whom this project would not have been possible: Dr. Antoinette Stafford and Dr. Sean McGrath. Dr. Stafford is, in many ways, the reason why I am doing philosophy, and it is to her that I owe my knowledge of the history of modern philosophy and German Idealism, without which this book would never have gotten off the ground. Dr. McGrath sparked my interest in psychoanalysis and has been a constant source of inspiration for my reading of Schelling. I must thank him for stressing the notion of the ambiguity of the Real in Lacan and Žižek, which immensely shaped my own engagement with these authors, and for all the encouragement he has given me since.

Secondly, I should thank four people who read the manuscript at various stages of its production. Dr. Peter Trnka and the late Dr. James Bradley read a very early version of the manuscript several years ago, and I am much indebted to their extremely kind and useful commentary. While Dr. Bradley gave me insight into further aspects of Žižek’s philosophy—some of which has shown up in my other work on Žižek—and encouraged me to continue the project, Dr. Trnka’s much appreciated criticism helped me avoid conceptual imprecision at several key points, as well as general difficulties in the presentation of psychoanalytical methodology. Specifically, Dr. Trnka’s emphasis on the conflictual relation between materialism and idealism in many ways moulded my own views on the difficult Symbolic-Real relation in Žižek’s transcendental materialism into the form they take here. Dr. Graham Harman’s comments and suggestions were of great help in stylistically improving the manuscript’s quality, in increasing its overall coherence, and also in avoiding several pitfalls of argumentation. I should also thank him for his always quick responses to various questions I had while preparing the manuscript. Last but certainly not least, I thank Kyla Bruff for her laborious proofreading of the final two drafts. Her careful eye was able to eliminate innumerable ambiguities and awkward turns of phrase, thus making the book much smoother.

Thirdly, I would like to express my gratitude to the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada and Europhilosophie for their generous funding, which both directly and indirectly supported the project. I would also like to thank the Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Department of Philosophy and School of Graduate Studies for additional financing in the form of fellowships and awards, which enabled me to begin the first draft.

An early version of three strands of argumentation that appear in what follows has been published as “The Grundlogik of German Idealism: The Ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling Relation in Slavoj Žižek,” International Journal of Žižek Studies, 5, no.1 (2011); “’Why is There Nothing Rather Than Something?’ Less Than Nothing’s New Metaphysics,” International Journal of Žižek Studies, 8. no.1 (2014); and “Denaturalizing Nature, Dehumanizing Humanity: Lacan, Žižek, and the Metaphysics of Psychoanalysis,” in Natürlichkeit und Künstlichkeit zwischen Tatsache und Ideal, ed. Benedetta Bisol (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014).

Introduction
A Metaphysical Archaeology of the Psychoanalytico-Cartesian Subject

This book is an investigation into Slavoj Žižek’s return to German Idealism in the wake of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Its thematic crux is Žižek’s attempt to develop, by reading the traditions against one another by means of their mutually compatible notions of Todestrieb, a highly original theory of subjectivity able to explain the subject’s simultaneous freedom from and dependence upon its material ground. But it does not stop there: rather than just limiting itself to a recapitulation of Žižek’s account of the eruptive, ontologically devastating birth of subjectivity out of nature, it also seeks to systematize the stark metaphysical consequences of this account. The fundamental thesis of this book is that, if the emergence of the Symbolic out of the Real—the passage from nature to culture enacted by the founding gesture of subjectivity—is the advent of a completely self-enclosed, self-sustaining structural system, then not only must its founding gesture withdraw from the scene in the very act of instituting the Symbolic, but further, even to explain this act we must posit the absolute as a fragile not-all wrought by negativity and antagonism. Or, to put it in terms of Žižek’s Less Than Nothing (his latest magnum opus, or “big fat Hegel book,” as he says), as a series of less than nothings whose essence constitutes an ontologically incomplete field.

By means of a metaphysical archaeology of the psychoanalytico-Cartesian subject, an archaeology that is the necessary supplement to Freud’s own archaeological investigations of the emergence of mind out of the conflict of unconscious drives and their vicissitudes,¹ especially in the aftermath of Lacan’s structuralist reworkings of it, what we will see is that Žižek’s own ontology of the subject goes far beyond the normal constraints of psychoanalytical methodology (which is so concerned with psychogenesis and its various pathologies) and radically challenges our normal conception of self and world, a challenge summarized by the notion of ontological catastrophe, which I extract from it as its key operative moment. In the course of the book this concept takes on a number of different meanings.

In a first moment, it refers to Žižek’s interpretation of Todestrieb as that which incites the passage from nature to culture, a grotesque excess of life that is unable to control itself according to its own prescribed natural logistics and thus opens up room for the possibility of experience.

In a second moment, it names the self-positing of subjectivity in nature tearing the latter apart into irreconcilable zones, which, although in a certain sense conditioned by a libidinal-material breakdown of the biological system, is ultimately irreducible to the latter as a pure act. Taken together, these two moments underlying the emergence of subjectivity demand that we delve into the naturephilosophy that this account implies, a nature that shows itself (due to the very extimate presence of Todestrieb and pure difference within its heart of hearts) to be predicated upon painful tension and self-sabotaging tendencies to such a degree that its very being is coincidental not only with the existence of death, disease, and monstrosities, but also with the always possible unpredictable upsurge of disorder and complete collapse as it risks touching the void.

In a third moment, the metaphysical archaeology of the subject is pushed to its ultimate limits. Delving into the question of how being could sustain itself despite its rampant and devastating negativity, what we will see is how the more we move towards the most fundamental level of the universe, the latter proves to be in its depths of depths not a dense, fully subsisting reality that exists by itself by means of a self-explanatory surplus, but a series of indeterminate proto-ontological states only minimally distinguishable from the void of nothingness that serves as its contrast. Wondering how this void of nothingness could be broken so that creation itself could emerge, Žižek argues that the basic form of ontological catastrophe should be extended from that of the subject as the breakdown of nature in Todestrieb, or the incompletion of nature testified to by the latter’s constitutive tension, to the world itself as the necessary disturbance of this void, whereby the classical terrain of metaphysics itself is inverted: “[f]or a true dialectician, the ultimate mystery is not ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ but ‘Why is there nothing rather than something?’: how is it that, the more we analyze reality, the more we find a void?”² In broad strokes, this is the terrain we will investigate—a terrain that is not merely difficult because it is nuanced and challenging because it is new, but also primordially uncanny and traumatic, forcing us to encounter aspects of self and world that we not only normally do not acknowledge, or continually disavow, but that we even try to repress. To arrive at and evaluate this notion of ontological catastrophe, my metaphysical archaeology of the Žižekian psychoanalytico-Cartesian subject takes three paths: one that traverses the wider historical context informing Žižek’s project, another that internally reconstructs its reactualization of German Idealism through psychoanalysis, and a final one that attempts to extract and problematize the intrinsic originality and daringness of Žižek’s metaphysics.

The first path consists of chapters 1 through 4. Chapter 1 outlines the ambiguity of the Real in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Displaying a form of radical idealism of a linguistic structuralist variety, it proclaims that the Symbolic operates as a self-enclosed system with no need of any external support. This not only means that human freedom is equivalent to an ontological madness, but also appears to foreclose the very possibility of explaining this passage into madness at its basis. Chapter 2 shows how, although Žižek believes himself able to find resources to overcome this difficulty in German Idealism, he can only do so by psychoanalytically tracing and reconstructing an unconscious history of struggle with the obscure origins of subjectivity he perceives throughout the tradition. Insofar as the psychotic non-relation between the Real and the Symbolic is also a rethinking of the cogito, chapter 3 shows why Žižek feels the theoretical obligation to revitalize subjectivity in an intellectual milieu that attacks it from all sides. Chapter 4 tries to understand how the Real could have given rise to the Symbolic. Contra the early and middle Lacan, Žižek argues that the Symbolic cannot be an external parasite that attacks the Real from nowhere, but must arise from some sort of self-sabotaging tendency always already implicit within it.

The second path, which unfolds through chapters 5 to 10, comprises the substantiation of Žižek’s claim that there is an identity between the founding insights of German Idealism and psychoanalysis by retroactively rewriting the former’s unconscious history. Drawing upon the late Lacan’s ruminations concerning the breakdown of nature as the pre-condition of the Symbolic, chapter 5 outlines how Kant finds also himself forced to posit a meta-transcendental ground of the transcendental in organic disorder, even going so far as to anticipate Lacan’s mirror stage. Chapter 6 demonstrates how the early Hegel, led by insufficiencies in Kant’s and Fichte’s transcendentalism and Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, attempts to reconcile idealist freedom and realist system by inscribing the subject into the fold of being as an eruptive, world-shattering event, thus radicalizing Kant’s insight into the devastating origins of subjectivity. Chapter 7 then illustrates how the mature Hegel psychoanalytically recoils from the ontological catastrophe at the heart of the subject’s essence by subsuming it under the self-mediation of the Notion. It is only with the middle-late Schelling, fighting against the perceived threats of Absolute Idealism, that the true kernel of truth unearthed by Kantian idealism is brought to the fore and along with it its stark, even horrifying implications for our understanding of nature, human historicity, and the absolute. Chapter 8 gives flesh to the Schellingian-Žižekian subject as the vanishing mediator between the Real and the Ideal. The symbolic universe of meaning is not a high point of evolutionary achievement, but rather a mistake, the outcome of something having gone horribly wrong in the order of things and to which it is only a defense mechanism. Given the psychoanalytical horror that is the basis of subjectivity, chapter 9 explains how Schelling, although the thinker of its abyssal origins, ultimately ends up recoiling just like Hegel from own great insights after coming face to face with its full trauma, which gives further support to the necessity of a psychoanalytical reconstruction of German Idealism. After this concrete exploration of Žižek’s methodology, chapter 10 concludes the second path by bringing to the fore his three most significant theoretical contributions: a rich ontology of nature, a new metaphysics of the void developed through quantum mechanics, and a nuanced theory of unconscious, each of which goes beyond a mere reactualization of German Idealism or psychoanalysis.

The third and final path is summarized by the word “paradoxical” in the subtitle of the book—Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism. Chapter 11 highlights that, instead of being opposed to metaphysics, radical idealism not only demands a metaphysics, for thinking in all of its intrinsic paradox and self-referentiality must be seen as existing in the world, but more primordially forces upon us a new domain of metaphysics, which first became explicit in German Idealism. Whereas all metaphysics prior to Kant is dogmatic insofar as it assumes thought’s power to reach out and touch the truth of being in virtue of a special capacity (a gesture that is repeated by, amongst others, Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s elevation of mathematical formalization), what occurs in Schelling and Hegel is an intense reflection upon how the very process by which thought forms an image of being is inscribed into being as an event, whereby even the very philosophical position of theory formation is reflexively thematized both epistemologically and ontologically. What emerges is a metaphysics that can be baptized as critical because it is capable of developing a theory of reality that is maximally realist and idealist and therefore best suited to explicate the metaphysical whole of what is without falling into the downfalls of a theory that is one-sidedly one or the other.³ Chapter 12 explores the paradoxical nature of this endeavour as it articulates itself in the intrinsically original and daring character of Žižek’s own variation upon this German Idealist leitmotif and the problems it potentially poses not only for his own philosophy, but perhaps for any radical idealism seeking to break the correlationist circle.

Notes

1.  This, of course, being a constant metaphor throughout Freud’s corpus, spanning from “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896) to “Construction in Analysis” (1937). See, respectively,The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953–1974) (hereafter SE), III, p. 192, and XXIII, p. 259.

2.  Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), p. 925.

3. Gabriel draws a distinction between critical and dogmatic metaphysics for similar, but different reasons. See Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift (Bonn: University Press, 2006), p. 8. I take up this distinction at length in chapter 11.

I
Death Drive

Chapter 1
The Madness of the Symbolic
Transcendental Materialism and the Ambiguity of the Real

Re-interpreting Freud through structural linguistics, Lacan radically rethinks the unconscious: no longer a quasi-biological phenomenon centered in drives, it largely becomes associated with the differential system of the Symbolic responsible for the production of meaning. However, since the latter proves to be operationally closed and has no relationship to the world in itself, Lacan himself is forced to proclaim that the founding gesture of subjectivity is a passage through madness. This poses two difficulties that set up the entirety of Žižek’s project. First, it points towards a transcendental materialism at the basis of the subject, a self-splitting of being into irreconcilable material and transcendental zones, but one that Lacan fails to systematize. Second, insofar as the Symbolic itself is self-enclosed, it seems methodologically impossible even to explain its own obscure origins, even if such is ultimately required if psychoanalysis is to find an adequate theoretical justification. In this regard, Žižek’s primary task is to find a way to explain the madness of the Symbolic without overstepping the constraints of psychoanalysis.

1.1 A (Transcendental) Materialism of the Psychoanalytical Subject

Žižek’s return to German Idealism is an investigation of the obscure origins of the Lacanian subject. Žižek is attracted not only to Lacanian psychoanalysis’ thematization of the non-coincident “gap” in the Symbolic and its consequences for politics, but also to the conflictual relationship between mind and body that it places at the foundation of psychogenesis. If symbolic structures of language display a radical autonomy from bodily forces and can construct their own world, the essence of human being must be constituted originally by a kind of biological “short circuit” that disrupts man’s complete immersion in nature, eternally separating the Innenwelt and Aussenwelt (inner world and outer world), thereby making it so they can never coincide: that is, by a mal-adaptation that “represents the minimum of freedom, of a behaviour uncoupled from the utilitarian-survivalist attitude” insofar as “the organism is no longer fully determined by its environs, that it ‘explodes/implodes’ into a cycle of autonomous behaviour.”⁴ If, as conventionally defined in Freudian psychoanalysis, psychosis or madness is taken to be a withdrawal from the objective world into an inner, self-enclosed space (a loss of reality),⁵ then in Lacanian psychoanalysis psychosis or madness is paradoxically not a mere accidental state seen in certain “sick” individuals, but is the irreducible ontological background of all human existence. More disconcertingly, this is understood by Lacan not only to be the condition of possibility of human experience as such, but also that of freedom, so that the philosophical significance of the two is ultimately identified as dialectically interrelated aspects of the same phenomenon:

Thus rather than resulting from a contingent fact—the frailties of his organism—madness is the permanent virtuality of a gap in his essence.

And far from being an “insult” to freedom, madness is freedom’s most faithful companion, following its every move like a shadow.

Not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, but it would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom.⁶

For Lacan, the primary question in psychoanalysis is not how various forms of madness arise as a deviation from normal mental health, but how this more originary, irruptive state of nature as that within which freedom and madness magically emerge in a single brushstroke can be regulated so that what we regard as sanity and normality can themselves take hold. If madness is “freedom’s most faithful companion” it is precisely because madness in its most primordial sense refers to the specific ontogenetic conditions for the irreducibility of language that makes us distinctly human: that is to say, to the state of affairs by means of which language can solipsistically relate to itself as a self-enclosed differential system of signification “with no an external support.”⁷ Just as in clinical cases of psychosis or madness, here too the subject has “lost touch” with reality, although reality must be understood in its natural (animalistic) rather than its sociopolitical (human) meaning. It is “the price the Lacanian subject pays for its ‘transubstantiation’ from being the agent of a direct animal vitality to being a speaking subject whose identity is kept apart from the direct vitality of passions,”⁸ that which guarantees that the subject is dominated by “non-natural” influences or which is, strictly speaking, at its zero-level abiological (wherein lies its freedom). This has two principal effects. First, because Lacan’s self-given task is to formulate the autonomous structures that constitute human subjectivity in opposition to naturalist theories of psychiatry, his philosophy has the formal appearance of a retour to the modern transcendentalism of the cogito. The Lacanian subject is consequently haunted by similar problems as those of the Cartesian subject, both in terms of epistemology (since the relationship to the extra-conscious alterity of the world is problematized, how can we justify the propositions of science?) and the mind-body relation (what exactly is the relationship between symbolic thinking and natural processes?). Second, due to the internal constraints of his project, Lacan left unanswered how reality in itself could incite the generation of these quasi-transcendental structures that make up the universe of human meaning in its psychotic self-enclosure, with the concomitant problem of how we relate to this X that simultaneously precedes our emergence into language and forms its obscure ontologico-foundational basis. Seeing a structural identity with the immediate reactions to Kant, Žižek sees the possibility of confronting the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis with those of German Idealism.

Žižek’s metaphysics originates in his attempt to delve into the material origins preceding the psychoanalytical subject by focusing on this moment of immanent rupture in being—which he links to the Todestrieb—as that which, by opening up a space separating us from nature in the latter, appears simultaneously to be linked to our freedom, that is, to our madness. Refusing to buy into the claim that all is ultimately reducible to the ebb and flow of matter, he sees his own endeavour as “the necessary step in the rehabilitation of the philosophy of dialectical materialism.”⁹ Yet this designation is inherently problematic, given what we have just seen: not only does it try to make Žižek’s own form of materialism approach that of Marx and Engels without drawing the necessary distinctions between them, it more importantly fails to articulate the essentially paradoxical and innovative manner in which Žižek rearticulates the materialism-idealism debate and therefore risks obscuring his own originality. Consequently, I endorse Adrian Johnston’s characterization of Žižek’s theory of the subject as a form of transcendental materialism¹⁰ for four reasons, but differ in my own understanding in one important way that in turn distinguishes my own project from his.

First, it has the benefit of allowing the reader to have a direct intuition of what is truly at stake in Žižek’s parallax ontology and its metaphysical implications. Whereas dialectical materialism traditionally views the mind-body relationship as grounded within the dynamic interpenetration of the two as a complex self-unfolding identity within difference, transcendental materialism, by focusing on the ontogenetic conditions of the possibility of the transcendental subject, conventionally understood as in opposition to natural conditions, already suggests the immanent emergence of an irruptive negativity within being, an irreducible transcendence that paradoxically shatters the former’s pure immanence from within.

Second, a point not mentioned by Johnston, Fichte uses the expression in his 1794 Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation to draw attention to the impossibility of explaining the (onto)genesis of the subject: “[i]t is certainly not true that the pure I is a product of the not-I [...]. The assertion that the pure I is a product of the not-I expresses a transcendental materialism which is completely contrary to reason.”¹¹ Fichte’s argument is simple: one cannot explain the material conditions of transcendental freedom insofar as that would equate two logically distinct fields irreconcilable with one another—namely, that of unbridled self-determination (the realm of acting) and that of dead contingency (the realm of being), thus causing us to lose sight of the radicality of human autonomy. Writing in a similar vein, Žižek attempts to show not only how we can, but more primordially why we must develop a metaphysical account of reality that, instead of jeopardizing the (practical) primacy of idealism, would actually found it by inscribing this very dualism of I and not-I into the fold of being as that which makes the absolute divided within itself and whose non-coincidence to self thereby opens up the birthplace for human freedom. Transcendental idealism is—or better, must be said to always already spectrally refer to—transcendental materialism, the difference between them being only that of a parallax shift: the two are negatively linked to one another by an impossible in-between, a disjunctive “and,” the very name of which is for Žižek the subject, so that an idealism must convert itself into a materialism and vice versa if subjectivity is to be fully explained.

It is precisely at this conceptual conjuncture of the role of a disjunctive “and” that my own understanding of Žižek’s transcendental materialism distinguishes itself from that of Johnston. Although Johnston is right to claim that Žižek’s own descriptions of the birth of subjectivity have a propensity to focus on its process as a self-instituting fiat “analogous to the cutting of the Gordian knot” (which in a certain sense obfuscates his project insofar as one of its major questions is how the closed circuit of drives in the Real could result in the transcendence of subjectivity),¹² Johnston in my view has a tendency to downplay the intrinsically paradoxical nature of all such inquiry into the obscure origins of the psychoanalytico-Cartesian subject in Žižek’s work in two ways. On the one hand, he emphasizes that the subject is rendered possible by a short-circuiting of its libidinal-material ground. But if an emergent breakdown in nature’s inner being does give rise to the ontogenetic possibility of the subject, it in no way gives birth to the latter: nature’s auto-laceration may be necessary for the self-positing freedom of transcendental subjectivity, but it is not sufficient, for there is no possible transition from nature to subjectivity, a point that—though also raised by Johnston—I believe must be radicalized. This is why on my reading the reference to Fichte is so important, for if Žižek’s metaphysics is an attempt to show how a transcendental materialism can be developed, it nevertheless refuses to give up on the fundamental claim made by Fichte that the upsurge of the pure I in being is executed “by absolute freedom, not through a transition, but by means of a leap.”¹³ As a result, we can also understand why Žižek displays hesitation concerning Johnston’s and Malabou’s shared project of merging philosophy and neuroscience—because there is ultimately no emergence of subjectivity possible within his parallax ontology.¹⁴ On the other hand, because Johnston attaches less importance than I do to the rupturing free leap into subjectivity, he is simultaneously silent concerning the necessarily mytho-poetic element of Žižek’s transcendental materialism, which for me thus becomes central for understanding the nuance of his specific overcoming of radical idealism. This has two important consequences, one methodological and the other metaphysical. Methodologically, if the leap into subjectivity is an ontological passage through madness,¹⁵ then there is an upper limit to the power of thought to explain its own emergence in being. What we need is a capacity for fabulative mythologizing, for “the need for the form of mythical narrative arises when one endeavours to break the circle of the symbolic order and to give an account of its genesis (’origins’) from the Real and its pre-symbolic antagonism.”¹⁶ Metaphysically, if subjectivity is the psychotic night of the world, then any investigation into its underlying ontology simultaneously requires a metaphysical archaeology of madness, that is, a theorizing of what the ultimate structure of reality must be like so that the subject’s emergence could occur. In this manner, if Johnston is perhaps more interested in the paradoxical basis of transcendental subjectivity in nature, I am more interested in what occurs methodologically and metaphysically once we inscribe radical idealism as a form of madness into being, in such a way that two similar yet different views of Žižek’s system emerge.

Third, to return to the benefits of the characterization “transcendental materialism,” I endorse it because it draws our attention to Žižek’s philosophical relevance outside of the fields of cultural studies, radical politics, and film theory by placing his thinking in direct contact with a series of other contemporary thinkers rethinking metaphysics, whether it be by representatives of the analytic tradition, object-oriented philosophy, new French materialism, or various other forms of the new speculative turn. Two thinkers deserve to be mentioned here by name, since they offer a transcendental materialism radically different from that of Žižek: Iain Hamilton Grant and Rainer E. Zimmerman. Although Grant would have reservations about his thinking being referred to as a “transcendental” materialism, his Philosophies of Nature after Schelling¹⁷ offers an alternative account of the materialism-idealism relationship and the immanent emergence of the transcendental subject within nature that challenges not only Žižek’s reading of Schelling, but more strongly his entire metaphysics. Zimmerman, a prolific German philosopher little known in the English-speaking world, was in fact the first person to use the concept of “transcendental materialism” in a contemporary context in his 1998 book Die Rekonstruktion von Raum, Zeit und Materie (The Reconstruction of Space,Time and Matter)¹⁸ and then fully develop it in his massive 2004 System des transzendentalen Materialismus (System of Transcendental Materialism).¹⁹ Zimmerman, like Grant, departs largely from Schelling, but also from Spinoza and Bloch, and offers an understanding of transcendental materialism in dialogue with contemporary science, especially physics, in stark opposition to the one presented here. For both, the thinking subject does not implicate an ontological trembling or pure difference within the field of being, and their respective accounts of the mind-body relationship can in no means be equated with what Žižek would perhaps be tempted to call a return to pre-modern cosmology. Moreover, considering how Žižek’s own philosophy, similar in spirit to that of Zimmerman, does not possess mere implications or consequences for how we conduct empirical science, but directly engages with a broad range of disciplines such as quantum mechanics²⁰ and cognitive science,²¹ by calling Žižek’s philosophy a transcendental materialism I further hope to accomplish two things: to emphasize the systematic reach of Žižek’s thinking and the exigence that metaphysics must also be an interlocutor with science.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that in Less Than Nothing Žižek also endorses Adrian Johnston’s coinage of “transcendental materialism” in two passages in the last chapter on quantum mechanics, but with an important qualification that renders explicit for the first time a crucial metaphysical element of his own brand of materialism and its nuanced character. In the first instance, he claims that the key insight gained by contemporary physics is that material reality in itself does not present us with a dense field of fully constituted realities that form the ultimate building blocks of the universe, but rather with irreducibly indeterminate states lacking any substantial being and from which “hard” reality can only emerge if there is a collapse of the wave function.²² In this sense, the micro-universe of quantum particles is strangely “less” than that of the macro-universe that constructs itself from its vicissitudes, in a way that is remarkably similar to how the Kantian subject can only construct a unified, coherent world of appearances from the inconsistent fragments of sensation. In a strange logical short circuit, it would appear that not only is there no bottom-up causality at the level of experience (transcendental constitution is more real than what Kant calls “a rhapsody of perception”²³), but even the most fundamental level of the universe is metaphysically more chaotic than the ordered macro-level physical world that science classically described. It is as if all reality is transcendentally constitutive, so that the only way to break free of the correlationist circle is to push “this transcendental correlation into the Thing itself:” “[i]t is against this background that one can make out the contours of what can perhaps only be designated by the oxymoron ‘transcendental materialism’ (proposed by Adrian Johnston).”²⁴ The second instance adds some clarification to the metaphysical implications of this idea by stating that the “the only true consistent ‘transcendental materialism’ which is possible after the Kantian transcendental idealism” is one that risks the following difficult wager: “[w]hat if we posit that ‘Things-in-themselves’ emerge against the background of the Void of Nothingness, the way this Void is conceived in quantum physics, as not just a negative void, but the portent of all possible reality?”²⁵ Although Žižek here takes transcendental materialism in a different direction than Johnston by introducing it to make a metaphysical point concerning the absolute rather than a more broadly ontological one concerning the subject, part of my project in what follows will be to show that his metaphysics of the void is not only completely compatible with his older ontology of the subject, but can be seen as its organic elaboration.

If Žižek’s approach differs significantly from that of Grant or Zimmerman, it is because his game is different, even though this leads him to cover much of the same thematic domains—and hence it is interesting to label all three as “transcendental materialists” for the same reasons as it is to refer to Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling as “German Idealists” insofar as subsuming such irreconcilably different thinkers under a single category reveals a dynamic, pulsating movement, a battleground of theoretical positions around a shared set of problems rather than a shared doctrine, and thus something living. What so strongly distinguishes Žižek’s form of transcendental materialism from others is that, finding a fundamental structural identity between Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-Kantian idealism, he tries to illustrate the uncanny identity that exists between the psychoanalytical subject haunted by the Todestrieb as its constitutive basis and the unconscious, disavowed Grundlogik of German Idealism, with the conviction that a psychoanalytical dialogue between the two could open up a radically new possibility for metaphysics. By falling upon premonitions of the psychoanalytical experience in concepts such as Kantian unruliness, the Hegelian “night of the world,” and the Schellingian notion of the Grund, Žižek psychoanalytically reinterprets the late German Idealist attempts to give a metaphysical vision of reality compatible with the ontological emergence of the pure I in order to make us not only rethink what is at stake in the tradition of modern philosophy, a truth repressed and haunting its very history, but more primordially what is revealed with the advent of subjectivity as such: the notion of ontological catastrophe, the auto-disruption of reality into a painful not-all, at the origin of experience, with all the metaphysical implications that entails for our understanding of world in itself. Although Žižek’s interpretations are heterodox, he believes that he is justified in singling out and radicalizing these premonitions, which often only appear in textual margins and often officially lack the theoretical primacy that Žižek bestows upon them, by means of the methodological application of various psychoanalytical techniques to the texts of German Idealism, these enabling him to plunge into and reveal the non-coincidences internally plaguing their symbolic space and thus retroactively restructuring their surface appearance in a manner similar to the analyst-analysand relation in therapy. We must traverse the fantasy of tradition if we are to arrive at its truth—this is Žižek’s provocative claim and one that we will explore throughout most of this book. Thus, if we are to gain a preliminary sense of the driving forces of Žižek’s reactualization of German Idealism and the systematicity of its method in spite of its apparent self-serving selectiveness, we must briefly pass through the Lacanian subject.

1.2 The Lacanian Subject and the Irreducible Ambiguity of the Real

As the fundamental presupposition of Žižek’s philosophy, the Lacanian subject is to be radically distinguished from the philosophical subject of modernity. Although the former exhibits many traits that link it to early transcendental philosophy (it grounds the symbolic structures that constitute phenomenal reality through a free idealization) it is in direct opposition to the self-conscious transparency of the Cartesian cogito, the self-legislation of the Kantian rational agent, or the Hegelian account of free personality. For Lacan, the freedom of the I as witnessed in phenomenological self-experience is an illusion: completely determined by cultural and linguistic influences, the ego is an object and is constantly trying to construct a fantasmatic narcissistic space within which it can (falsely) perceive itself as a centre of self-effectuating action. Although this does not prevent the existence of human freedom for either Lacan or Žižek, it means that freedom itself gets largely displaced from consciousness into the unconscious, in a move formally similar to the middle-late Schelling of the Freiheitsschrift and Weltalter, but with an important twist. The subject is not an energetic, productive will that precedes the constitution of phenomenal reality, but is in one of its most important modalities nothing but an impersonal abyss that, uncannily, renders possible a minimal consistency of self. In this sense, the self is infinitely split at its core: when one looks inside oneself one not only finds an “extimacy,” material coming from elsewhere, where one should find one’s innermost core, but if one looks long enough one only finds a void staring back. The Lacanian-Žižekian subject has no intrinsic content because it is pure form: the entire “plenitude” of cultural and psychological experience only emerges as a kind of defence formation against this primordial nothingness of the subject as an attempt to fill in its constitutive “gap” with false positive substantiality. But because this “gap” can never be filled in, it is ultimately repressed due to its traumatic, personality-shattering quality, so that we find traces of its disavowed knowledge in the slips and slides of speech, symbolic inconsistencies and non-coincidences in writing, the images of fantasies and dreams, and other phenomena. This creates two levels to any given (personal, ethical, political, or even philosophical) discourse: its surface movement, grounded in the narcissistic, self-deceiving orbit of the ego, and its “latent,” underlying truth, which shows itself negatively within the holes and inconsistencies of the former and can only be brought forth après-coup. In therapy, the task of the analyst is to make the analysand encounter and appropriate the second, the Real that afflicts the analysand often to a degree of painful agony, thereby forcing them to realign the symbolic structures underlying their personality so that the latter are more in tune with that which they reject, given that this (unconscious) act of recoil and exclusion has begun to obstruct their life. After all, the repressed always returns.

To explain this complex, Lacanian psychoanalysis categorizes experience in terms of the three registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. All three exist in dialectical simultaneity, so that they all depend upon and interpenetrate one another. Lacan uses a Borromean knot to illustrate this level of mutual co-existence, the point of which is to preclude the possibility of arguing for the primacy of one register over the other, as it is unclear if either can have logical priority insofar as the cutting off or isolating of one destroys the whole. The Imaginary is roughly equivalent to phenomenological experience and perception but is also related to the cogito and its “narcissistic” fantasy of existential self-mastery. It is identified with a necessary moment of misrecognition and irremovable untruth in one’s everyday being and knowledge of self, world, and others, for it projects completion where there is lack. The Symbolic constitutes the logical fabric of language and the laws of culture that transcend and are anterior to the concretely existing personal subject. It therefore precedes the imaginary orbit of experience insofar as the individual phenomenological constitution of objects in a strong sense presupposes language. As a self-enclosed structural system capable of reproducing and propagating itself, the Symbolic displays an irreducible autonomy that displaces the role of nature in understanding human psychology and cultural phenomena because it is able to articulate itself in utter isolation from it: the “incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier,”²⁶ the solipsistic dance of language always in step with itself, means that the essential link between signifier and transcendent, extra-linguistic signified has been violently ruptured and that the mere chains of signifiers relating to themselves are capable of producing/constructing meaning by themselves in an ontological void. In its simplest form, the Real is that which does not fall under either the Imaginary or the Symbolic, whereby its upsurge is associated with experiences of breakdown and inconsistency not only of the transcendental unity at the basis of phenomenological experience, but even of language or culture itself. Lacan and Žižek therefore use a plethora of adjectives to describe it, which attempt to capture this element of irrevocable logical and existential rupture: “traumatic,” “monstrous,” “horrifying,” and “impossible,” to name a few.

Yet there is an irreducible ambiguity in Lacan’s definition of the Real, which serves as the starting point for Žižek’s own philosophical endeavour, for it is precisely in trying to resolve this ambiguity that his metaphysical project gets off the ground. The Real elicits two potentially incompatible interpretative possibilities, and we often see Lacan oscillating back and forth between them. In its first guise, the Real is the excluded Other of the Imaginary and Symbolic, which only truly “comes to be” when the subject constitutes itself. In this sense, the Real is not only dependent upon the symbolic matrix of language and the orbit of phenomenological experience but also only shows itself negatively through their immanent obstruction. This Real-as-lack is distinctly Hegelian: it corresponds to concepts such as “tarrying with the negative” and the suffering that consciousness undergoes when it runs up against non-coincidence, paradox, and limitation in social and political action or scientific thought about the world. It has absolutely no positive content in itself even though, as an internal limit within a given symbolic space, it may effectuate an overhauling of the latter’s structure and possibilities as the subject attempts to overcome its deadlock so that it is potentially productive in its very trauma. In its second guise, we could also understand the Real as the pre-subjective life of pure jouissance from which the human infant exiles itself by becoming a linguistic subject, yet upon which the Imaginary and the Symbolic logically depend, even if they only relate to it negatively through its primordial foreclosure from experience and language as the founding gesture of subjectivity itself. Bruce Fink refers to this as the Real because it is the necessary posit of the Symbolic despite the fact that it is inaccessible from within the latter, whose ciphering activity doesn’t merely “reconstitute” objective reality by meditating it like a camera obscura. Given that this pre-subjective Real must be said to be without lack (only with language can we speak of absence and presence),²⁷ the idealizing process of human meaning makes it impossible to reach. As something that overreaches the idealizing, linguistic activity of the subject, in this modality the Real, corresponding to the Schellingian concept of the indivisible remainder (der nie aufgehende Rest), that pre-experiential darkness that can never be brought into light of consciousness yet upon which all consciousness rests, is the Real-as-excess. But such a free ciphering activity simultaneously creates the condition of the possibility of its own breakdown insofar as it will not always be capable of idealizing the Real in a way that enables its own autonomous, smooth functioning.²⁸ These “kinks” in the Symbolic correspond with the Real-as-lack or Real₂, something that cannot be integrated because it presents itself as intrinsically and paradoxically non-relational, as an inassimilable kernel within the self-referential matrix of the symbolic relations within which it emerged. The problem is as follows: Is the Real₁ a necessary, illusory construct of the Symbolic designed to give a fantasmatically fabricated sense of “positivity” to a world that exists beyond its grasp (rendering it a mere secondary effect of a solipsistically self-contained structuralist metapsychology)? Or is it, more primordially, the pre-subjective, ontological basis of the Symbolic, to which we have access despite the apparent impossibility of reaching the pure Real through the differential system of language (thus showing the obscure origins of the Real₂ in an ontology)? If the second is possible, what does this mean in terms of Lacan’s declaration of the logical equivalence and interpenetration of the registers?