Less Than Nothing Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism Review

April 19, 2022 Post a Comment

Slavoj Žižek
Verso Books ($69.99)

by Jim Kozubek

GWF Hegel (1770-1831), the pre-eminent German idealist, changed political discourse by staking the merits that "antimonies" or inconsistencies were persistent to any thesis, thus a arrangement would be perpetually besieged by antonym, and subject to transition into a synthesis. In his churning m-folio new tome, Slovenian philosopher and social critic Slavoj Žižek tells us that "what happened after Hegel" was that systems lost their ability to "condense" and incorporate the multiplicities of society, "so the excess became 'unbound', a threat to the representative system in all its guises." In short, no power structure tin can contain everything. In that location would always exist ample room for revolution.

Žižek, a cocky-described "communist in a qualified sense," draws upon the legacy of Hegel, along with the work of Sigmund Freud, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and philosopher Alain Badiou. His ambition is to heighten discourse on social, political, and scientific deadlocks past showing that inconsistencies are inherent in most positions. To Žižek, inconsistencies are not solely categories or arguments, but inscribed in nature (due east.thousand. the collapse of the wave part into a particle). Žižek calls these inconsistencies a "parallax," the "name for the most elementary split/diffraction." His 2006 workThe Parallax View (MIT Printing) is an excellent exploration of this theme.

Žižek draws a stardom between the "symbolic necessity that regulates our lives" and the Real that defies expression and resists incorporation into the order, expounding upon the Lacanian formulation of theobjet a, a "little piece of reality" that compels us to incorporate it into the symbolic club (he puts a glyph of a naked adult female on the book'southward dust jacket every bit an case of objet a). For Žižek, the Real resists incorporation into the symbolic order, and thus remains a surplus and a compulsion. Theobjet a stands in for a "pigsty in the symbolic social club"—in Hegelian terms "the nighttime of the globe," or in Freudian terms the "death drive." But this all ways that theobjet a is a "signifier" of the Real which must be destroyed (due east.g., Christ) in club for the symbolic order to emerge. Things don't go to be symbolically important until they stand in for something missing.

Theobjet a embodies compulsion to approach the existent. It likewise undoes our logic and sense of normalcy. "In a dear letter," Žižek says, "the very failure of the author to formulate his declaration in a articulate and effective way, his vacillations, the letter's fragmentary style, and so on, can in themselves exist proof (possibly the necessary and simply reliable proof) that the dear he professes is authentic." Or then as Simone Weil says, the lack holds our attention: "where there is nothing, read that I honey you."

"Less than Nothing" is Žižek's expression for the lack in the symbolic gild, the surplus that resists symbolization. He argues that approaching the Real is necessary to renew. "Hegel is also aware that, in order to prevent its own expiry by habituation . . . every conservative lodge needs to be shattered from time to time by war," he tells us. Žižek seeks to progress upon Hegel past incorporating theobjet a into Hegelian theory. The lack is essential to a system: "the radically New emerges only through pure repetition."

Žižek sees the time of Hegel, Fitche, Shelling, and Kant as contributing to a critical Rupture in historical thought proper. This evolution was afterwards taken to a new level of interpretation in the birth of modernism. Yet he is critical of thinkers (such equally Michel Foucault) who adhere to a historical idea process and seek to mediate historical and social influences through deconstruction (a "synchronic" analysis). Žižek insists the French "postal service-structuralists" and "deconstructivists" placed too much accent on the burden of the constructs, and not enough on the subject'south date and achievement through them. Instead, he expounds a dialectical arroyo. To Žižek, relationships are essential to ensure our authenticity, our freedom; they ensure we don't devolve into our own notions and fantasies. While modernism implored "the consequence of its own activeness," postmodernism, relativism, and mobilism get it all wrong, he tells united states of america, since they miss out on solidarity.

Not surprisingly, Žižek is likewise critical of what he calls "New Age Obscurantism," or whatsoever system which implies a harmony or unity of opposites. "Its falsity lies in the fact that it frees the universal notion of modernity of its antagonism," he says. "'Postmodernism' is rather the name for a regression, for a refusal to follow the consequences of the modernist break." For Žižek, the inscription of the parallax and the Existent implies that nature is never resolved in harmony. The wheel of life never stops, and fifty-fifty afterward we remember we've mastered something, it can all come apart. "Eppur si muove" or "and yet it moves," he says. The Real persists, eternally, beyond the symbolic order.

In the political sphere, Žižek argues that compromise cannot be as "a unity of opposites" only rather implies a failure of commitments. He argues that in a deadlocked two-party organisation, i party is simply a "symptom" of the other's intransigence, its effort at "specialness," its failure at solidarity. He therefore deplores strategies via centrism (Neb Clinton's "third style"), which obscure delusions in the current capitalist organisation. Instead, he argues for a radical alternative exterior the current system—one which requires the electric current system's complete downfall prior to renewal.

To illustrate this point, Žižek looks to recent European history. If Communism failed in its commitments, Žižek postulates, fascism failed in its revolution. Of the Holocaust, he says, the Jews, by becoming the "chosen people," had to "suffer the reaction to the fact that they excluded themselves from organic communal life and thereby abandoned themselves to a rootless, alienated existence." The symptoms are apparent, as "anti-Semitic soapbox constructs the figure of the Jew every bit a phantom-similar entity to exist found nowhere in reality, and and so uses this very gap, between the 'conceptual Jew' and the really existing Jews as the ultimate statement for anti-Semitism."

Symptoms of previously failed states, therefore, are apparent to Žižek in "late capitalism," with its rabble of unemployed peoples and its isolated elites; these display failed integration into the organic whole and beguile failed solidarity. He is concerned with the modern gap between the notional and actual (the intellectual arguments for capitalism and the endemic problems on Wall Street; the abstraction of capital, its digitalization, and its function of "money begetting more coin") as a serious threat to the social sphere. Yet he sees the Occupy Movement (which he attended last fall) as close to beingness a reaction to a notion of capitalism rather than a 18-carat third way, its own alternative stand up-for-yourself organization. He urges its proponents to build an intellectual edifice to merits a moral ground.

We need each other, Žižek claims, not an enemy. He notes that Hegel'south fascination was the "primacy of self-contradiction over the eternal obstacle" such that the "struggling subject needs the figure of the enemy to sustain the illusion of its own consistency . . . so much so that his (eventual) victory amounts to his ain defeat or disintegration."

Indeed, Žižek has built his reputation as a confrontational intellectual and conveys trigger-happy allusions in his writing: "crazy, tasteless even, equally information technology may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was'non violent plenty' . . . his violence was not 'essential' enough . . ." Žižek gets in trouble with sentences similar this because they are then easy to misinterpret, just reading through the entirety of the tome, his message is clear: a existent revolution is a delivery to solidarity, not a reaction to some notion of people in your community. If the Nazis wanted change, they should take focused their libido (violence) on their ain purposes, not reacted to projections like "the Jews."

Then Žižek wants Occupy Wall Street to grow upward and do something of the aforementioned. Yet his management, and this book, offers no real vision of alternatives to the electric current economic model in the West. He borrows a lead from Hegel and channels the "Owl of Minerva," a mythical owl who "merely takes flight at night." In other words, philosophy is only retrospective, non prescriptive, and we can simply see the errors of "late capitalism" in retrospect. Žižek doesn't let his readers know what parts of the system he sees as functional, but rather exhorts us to engage in "radical emancipatory politics" (whatsoever that means).

Less than Zilch is a master piece of work that is eminently readable, chock total of cinematic allusions and graphic jokes; information technology strives for a product like Hegel, where "each passage" does not necessarily follow a linear progression but "is a moment of creative invention." The book is raw with vital force, surplus even, and Žižek goes at information technology with a death bulldoze all his own. And yet he leaves obvious unturned questions. What went incorrect with Stalinism and Leninism and why? Could a model of strictly employee-owned corporations work? What we're left with is a surging, fragmentary work, which is, mayhap, the but reliable proof of its authenticity.