Repeating Žižek offers a serious engagement with the ideas and propositions of philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Often subjecting Žižek's work to a Žižekian analysis, this volume's contributors consider the possibility (or impossibility) of formalizing Žižek's ideas into an identifiable philosophical system. They examine his interpretations of Hegel, Plato, and Lacan, outline his debates with Badiou, and evaluate the implications of his analysis of politics and capitalism upon Marxist thought. Other essays focus on Žižek's approach to Christianity and Islam, his "sloppy" method of reading texts, his relation to current developments in neurobiology, and his theorization of animals. The book ends with an afterword by Žižek in which he analyzes Shakespeare's and Beckett's plays in relation to the subject. The contributors do not reach a consensus on defining a Žižekian school of philosophy—perhaps his idiosyncratic and often heterogeneous ideas simply resist synthesis—but even in their repetition of Žižek, they create something new and vital.
Contributors. Henrik Jøker Bjerre, Bruno Bosteels, Agon Hamza, Brian Benjamin Hansen, Adrian Johnston, Katja Kolšek, Adam Kotsko, Catherine Malabou, Benjamin Noys, Geoff Pfeifer, Frank Ruda, Oxana Timofeeva, Samo Tomšic, Gabriel Tupinambá, Fabio Vighi, Gavin Walker, Sead Zimeri, Slavoj Žižek
Repeating Žižek offers a serious engagement with the ideas and propositions of philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Often subjecting Žižek's work to a Žižekian analysis, this volume's contributors consider the possibility (or impossibility) of formalizing Žižek's ideas into an identifiable philosophical system. They examine his interpretations of Hegel, Plato, and Lacan, outline his debates with Badiou, and evaluate the implications of his analysis of politics and capitalism upon Marxist thought. Other essays focus on Žižek's approach to Christianity and Islam, his "sloppy" method of reading texts, his relation to current developments in neurobiology, and his theorization of animals. The book ends with an afterword by Žižek in which he analyzes Shakespeare's and Beckett's plays in relation to the subject. The contributors do not reach a consensus on defining a Žižekian school of philosophy—perhaps his idiosyncratic and often heterogeneous ideas simply resist synthesis—but even in their repetition of Žižek, they create something new and vital.
Contributors. Henrik Jøker Bjerre, Bruno Bosteels, Agon Hamza, Brian Benjamin Hansen, Adrian Johnston, Katja Kolšek, Adam Kotsko, Catherine Malabou, Benjamin Noys, Geoff Pfeifer, Frank Ruda, Oxana Timofeeva, Samo Tomšic, Gabriel Tupinambá, Fabio Vighi, Gavin Walker, Sead Zimeri, Slavoj Žižek
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Repeating Žižek offers a serious engagement with the ideas and propositions of philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Often subjecting Žižek's work to a Žižekian analysis, this volume's contributors consider the possibility (or impossibility) of formalizing Žižek's ideas into an identifiable philosophical system. They examine his interpretations of Hegel, Plato, and Lacan, outline his debates with Badiou, and evaluate the implications of his analysis of politics and capitalism upon Marxist thought. Other essays focus on Žižek's approach to Christianity and Islam, his "sloppy" method of reading texts, his relation to current developments in neurobiology, and his theorization of animals. The book ends with an afterword by Žižek in which he analyzes Shakespeare's and Beckett's plays in relation to the subject. The contributors do not reach a consensus on defining a Žižekian school of philosophy—perhaps his idiosyncratic and often heterogeneous ideas simply resist synthesis—but even in their repetition of Žižek, they create something new and vital.
Contributors. Henrik Jøker Bjerre, Bruno Bosteels, Agon Hamza, Brian Benjamin Hansen, Adrian Johnston, Katja Kolšek, Adam Kotsko, Catherine Malabou, Benjamin Noys, Geoff Pfeifer, Frank Ruda, Oxana Timofeeva, Samo Tomšic, Gabriel Tupinambá, Fabio Vighi, Gavin Walker, Sead Zimeri, Slavoj Žižek
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822375470 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2015 |
| Series: | [sic] Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 835 KB |
About the Author
Agon Hamza is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana, Slovenia. With Slavoj Žižek, he is the coauthor of From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo.
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Repeating Zizek
By Agon Hamza
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5905-0
CHAPTER 1
"Freedom or System? Yes, Please!": How to Read Slavoj Zizek's Less Than Nothing—Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
Adrian Johnston
Already eagerly awaited years in advance of its eventual appearance, the hulking 2012 tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism is a (if not the) leading candidate to date among Slavoj Zizek's many books for the title of his magnum opus. Apart from introducing a range of new material within the still-unfolding Zizekian corpus, Less Than Nothing also consolidates in a single volume numerous lines of thought running throughout Zizek's various prior texts. In particular, this 2012 work involves Zizek presenting his most thorough and detailed account thus far both of his interpretation of the full sweep of Kantian and post–Kantian German idealism as well as of how his own theoretical project carries forward these idealists' legacies in the contexts of the early twenty-first century.
My goal in this intervention is relatively modest: to establish the preliminary basis for an immanent critical assessment of Less Than Nothing. Given that Zizek grounds this book and his larger philosophical pursuits first and foremost in the history of German idealism, revisiting this history is one of the mandatory preconditions for properly evaluating Zizek's 2012 masterpiece. After putting this historical frame in place in what immediately follows, I then go on to spend time philosophically reexamining Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel especially (including the complexities of the Kant-Hegel relationship) in light of how Zizek comprehends and appropriates their ideas and arguments. To be more specific, I herein interpret Zizek's philosophy as fundamentally a creative extension (one drawing on such post-Hegelian resources as Marxism and psychoanalysis) of certain precise features of the post-Fichtean "Spinozism of freedom" already envisioned by Friedrich Hölderlin, F. W. J. Schelling, and Hegel starting in the 1790s. Interpreting Zizek thus, my intervention here builds, via its historical and philosophical traversals of German idealism, toward a conclusion pinpointing the exact questions and problems Zizek's materialism must address if his overall theoretical position is to be judged to be cogent, persuasive, and satisfying. In short, these questions and problems set the immanent critical criteria for determining what a successful realization of the philosophical program of Less Than Nothing would have to accomplish.
An extremely brief period between the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries sees an incredible explosion of intense philosophical activity in the German-speaking world, perhaps rivaled solely by the birth of Western philosophy itself in ancient Greece (although Alain Badiou passionately maintains that postwar France is philosophically comparable to these other two momentously important times and places). Inaugurated by Kant and accompanied by the Romantics as cultural fellow travelers, the set of orientations that has come to be known by the label "German idealism"—this movement spans just a few decades—partly originates in the 1780s with the debates generated by F. H. Jacobi's challenges to modern secular rationality generally, as well as Kant's then-new critical transcendental idealism especially. One of the most provocative moves Jacobi makes is to confront his contemporaries with a stark forced choice between either "system" or "freedom" (to use language that Schelling, a German idealist giant, employs to designate this Jacobian dilemma and its many permutations and variants). In Jacobi's Pietist Protestant view, the systematization of the allegedly contradiction-ridden Kantian philosophy—the post-Kantian idealists at least agree with Jacobi that Kant indeed falls short of achieving thoroughly rigorous systematicity—inevitably must result, as with any rationally systematic philosophy on Jacobi's assessment, in the very loss of what arguably is most dear to this philosophy itself in its contemporaneity with both the Enlightenment and, later, the French Revolution: in a word, autonomy (in Kant's specific case, the transcendental subject's powers of spontaneous judgment and self-determination). Suffice it to say, Jacobi is far from satisfied with the attempted resolution of the third of the "antinomies of pure reason" in the Critique of Pure Reason. This dissatisfaction is supported by Jacobi's undermining of the Kantian noumenal-phenomenal distinction through his criticisms of the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich), criticisms subsequently broadened and deepened by the "big three" of post-Kantian German idealism: J. G. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
With the unintended effect of igniting a burning fascination with Baruch Spinoza among a younger generation of intellectuals, Jacobi, as part of his anti-Enlightenment agenda, contentiously claims that Spinoza's monistic substance metaphysics is the one and only system inevitably arrived at by all unflinchingly consistent and consequent philosophical reasoning. Construing this metaphysics as materialistic and naturalistic, Jacobi equates Spinozist ontology with freedom-denying, subject-squelching determinism (i.e., "fatalism") and therefore also with atheistic "nihilism." The "pantheism controversy" (Pantheismusstreit) triggered by Jacobi's polemicizing saddles Kant's idealist successors, insofar as they wish to systematize Kantian philosophy (with varying degrees of sympathy and fidelity), with the task of formulating a totally coherent metaphysics (qua a seamlessly integrated epistemology and ontology) nonetheless preserving space within itself for the spontaneity of self-determining subjectivity.
Inspired by the failed efforts of K. L. Reinhold, the first (but far from foremost) post-Kantian German idealist, to ground Kant's critical-transcendental edifice on the firmer foundation of an apodictic first principle (i.e., an indubitable Grundsatz methodologically akin to René Descartes's Archimedean proposition "Cogito, ergo sum"), Fichte opts for a radical "primacy of the practical" as the key to a systematized (post)-Kantianism. Skipping over numerous details here, Fichte's position, as per his 1794 Wissenschaftslehre rooted in nothing more than the free activity of spontaneous subjectivity, quickly is itself found to be wanting in turn by certain of his contemporaries and soon-to-be immediate successors. Hölderlin's 1795 fragment "Über Urtheil und Seyn" (On Judgment and Being), penned by someone fresh from hearing Fichte lecture on this "scientific teaching," lays down the initial sketches for myriad subsequent arguments of his Tübingen seminary classmates Schelling and Hegel against the allegedly excessive subjectivism of Fichte's (and Kant's) brand of idealism. Hölderlin suggests the ultimate ontological unavoidability of presupposing or positing a non-/pre-subjective ground of being in relation to which the transcendental subject à la Kant and Fichte is a secondary outgrowth. His fragment heralds the final, post-Fichtean phase of classical German idealism (starting with Schelling's very public break with Fichte in 1801) insofar as this phase is animated by, among other things, the pursuit of a "Spinozism of freedom," namely, a dialectical-speculative synthesis of Spinoza (qua a proper name for the system of substance) with Kant and Fichte (qua proper names for the freedom of the subject). Hegel's insistence, in the deservedly celebrated preface to his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, on "grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject" ("das Wahre nicht als Substanz, sondern ebensosehr als Subjekt aufzufassen und auszudrücken"), is only the most famous slogan-like articulation of this far-reaching ambition kindled in him and Schelling by their dear old school friend the philosophically minded great poet.
Dated a year later than "Über Urtheil und Seyn," the short "Earliest System-Program of German Idealism" can be read as resonating with Hölderlin's text. Although written in Hegel's handwriting, the authorship of this 1796 fragment remains a matter of dispute among specialists in German idealism, with Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel all being put forward as possibly responsible for it. Regardless of which member of the Tübinger Stift trio originally composed it—I happen to favor those scholars, such as Otto Pöggeler and H. S. Harris, who make the case for Hegel being its original author—the "program" announced and outlined in it undeniably sets lasting key priorities for the subsequent philosophical agendas of both Schelling and Hegel.
As regards the project of a post-Fichtean, Hölderlin-inspired Spinozism of freedom in particular, "The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism" gestures specifically at the project of reverse engineering a (quasi-)naturalistic fundamental ontology (dealing with substance as per a Naturphilosophie) out of an axiomatically postulated affirmation of the actual, factual existence of spontaneous, autonomous selves (i.e., the subjects of transcendental idealist reflections). This fragment's author declares:
Since the whole of metaphysics falls for the future within moral theory ... this ethics will be nothing less than a complete system of all ideas or of all practical postulates (which is the same thing). The first idea is, of course, the presentation of myself as an absolutely free entity. Along with the free, self-conscious essence, there stands forth—out of nothing—an entire world, the one true and thinkable creation out of nothing.—Here I shall descend into the realms of physics; the question is this: how must a world be constituted for a moral entity? I would like to give wings once more to our backward physics, that advances laboriously by experiments.
The text continues:
Thus, if philosophy supplies the ideas, and experience the data, we may at last come to have in essentials the physics that I look forward to for later times. It does not appear that our present-day physics can satisfy a creative spirit such as ours is or ought to be.
Hegel and Schelling, regardless of who originally composed these lines, both go on to carry out the endeavor called for in these quoted passages. So, appropriately combining the two pairs of terms "substance" and "subject" (à la Hegel) and "system" and "freedom" (à la Schelling)—these terms refer in part to Hegel's and Schelling's subsequent fulfillments of this 1796 "program"—the "physics" (Physik) demanded here would amount to nothing less than a philosophical/ontological system of natural substance as itself autodialectically self-denaturalizing ("a world ... constituted for a moral entity") given that it has internally generated the freedom of autonomous subjectivity ("myself as an absolutely free entity") as a transcendence-in-immanence relative to it. In this context, the names "Spinoza" on the one hand and "Kant" and "Fichte" on the other stand for the monist-naturalist system of substance and transcendental idealist freedom of the subject, respectively.
Less Than Nothing requires for its proper evaluation being interpreted in relation to the background I have just summarized rather quickly in the preceding. (Incidentally, Badiou's sustained Lacan-inspired efforts to synthesize the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the structuralism of Louis Althusser likewise should be viewed as reengaging in the pursuit of a Spinozism of freedom—and this thanks to their avowed inheritance of Spinozism [Althusser] and transcendental idealism [Sartre].) In the introduction to his 2012 magnum opus, Zizek clearly and explicitly situates this book with respect to the hypercompressed history of German idealism in its full sweep. To begin with, he insists that the history of philosophy as philosophy proper only well and truly gets under way with Kant (an insistence he has voiced elsewhere too), with this history rapidly gaining momentum through Kant's immediate successors. Zizek speaks of "the unbearable density of thought ... provided by the mother of all Gangs of Four: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel."
Zizek's preliminary retelling of the story of German idealism as an introductory framing of Less Than Nothing focuses primarily on Kant's critical-transcendental turn as epitomized by the second half of the Critique of Pure Reason, namely, the "Transcendental Dialectic," wherein Kant purports to reveal the ultimate vanity of pure reason's pretensions to enjoy direct epistemological access to the independent ontological reality of such things-in-themselves as the soul, the cosmos, and God (i.e., the three "ideas of reason" generated by the "interest of reason" in achieving ultimate points of englobing synthesis: the "psychological," "cosmological," and "theological" ideas). Zizek, in his introduction, contrasts Kant's epistemological dialectics with the ontological dialectics of Schelling and Hegel, all the while acknowledging the profound indebtedness of the latter two to the former. As he lucidly spells out here, Kant's reactivation and redeployment of the ancient art of dialectics (paradigmatically on display in Plato's dialogue Parmenides, with which Zizek soon proceeds to engage) begins by irreparably shattering pre-Kantian metaphysical worldviews, introducing corrosive antinomies, contradictions, and the like into them. And, in the hands of the post-Kantians Schelling and Hegel, this Kantian revival of dialectics ends up, as it were, destroying the world itself qua image of being as a monolithic, unified One, a harmonious, coherent All. In other words, the ontologization of Kantian critical epistemology as per the first Critique's "Transcendental Dialectic" means that not only is the thinking of being inconsistent, but that being an sich is itself inconsistent too. Hegel achieves this breakthrough during his pre-Phenomenology Jena period when he finally drops the distinction between logic (as the thinking of epistemology) and metaphysics (as the being of ontology), with the consequence that the speculative dialectics of logic come to infect metaphysics/ontology. As for Schelling, Zizek restricts his praise along these precise lines to Schelling's middle period running from 1809 (with the Freiheitschrift) to 1815 (with the third draft of the Weltalter manuscripts). Furthermore, in the cases of both the mature Hegel and the middle-period Schelling, Zizek perspicuously discerns a decisive advance over Hölderlin's pioneering 1795 vision in "Über Urtheil und Seyn": whereas the Spinozism of freedom à la Hölderlin posits the ultimate substance of being as a seamless, undifferentiated Absolute (in the style of a neo-Platonic One), the versions of Hegel and Schelling beloved by Zizek radicalize this post-Fichtean project by injecting antagonisms, conflicts, gaps, splits, and so on into this Absolute itself (although I think Zizek overlooks select moments in the young Schelling's Naturphilosophie that already foreshadow, as early as 1798, the theosophical framings of primordial negativity in his subsequent 1809–1815 middle period).
In my 2008 book Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, I stress the importance for Zizek of construing the transition from Kant to Hegel as one from epistemological to ontological dialectics, with Hegel (and a specific Schelling) "ontologizing" the critical Kant. (Given that I treat Zizek's philosophical apparatus as per his earlier works at length in this book, I will focus here almost exclusively on Less Than Nothing.) At multiple junctures in Less Than Nothing, Zizek continues to characterize the Kant-Hegel rapport in these same terms. However, at other moments therein, he goes out of his way to correct this (mis)characterization (a new gesture of his surfacing for the first time in Less Than Nothing). I suspect that, without him explicitly saying as much, this is both a self-critique of his earlier depictions of Kant avec Hegel as well as a critique of my exegesis in this vein as per Zizek's Ontology. Zizek's critical qualifications begin thusly:
Kant ... goes only half-way in his destruction of metaphysics, still maintaining the reference to the Thing-in-itself as an external inaccessible entity, and Hegel is merely a radicalized Kant, who moves from our negative access to the Absolute to the Absolute itself as negativity. Or, to put it in terms of the Hegelian shift from epistemological obstacle to positive ontological condition (our incomplete knowledge of the thing becomes a positive feature of the thing which is in itself incomplete, inconsistent): it is not that Hegel "ontologizes" Kant; on the contrary, it is Kant who, insofar as he conceives the gap as merely epistemological, continues to presuppose a fully constituted noumenal realm existing out there, and it is Hegel who "deontologizes" Kant, introducing a gap into the very texture of reality. In other words, Hegel's move is not to "overcome" the Kantian division, but, rather, to assert it "as such," to remove the need for its "overcoming," for the additional "reconciliation" of the opposites, that is, to gain the insight—through a purely formal parallax shift—into how positing the distinction "as such" already is the looked-for "reconciliation." Kant's limitation lies not in his remaining within the confines of finite oppositions, in his inability to reach the Infinite, but, on the contrary, in his very search for a transcendent domain beyond the realm of finite oppositions: Kant is not unable to reach the Infinite—what he is unable to see is how he already has what he is looking for.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Trouble with Žižek / Agon Hamza 1
Part I. Philosophy
1. "Freedom or System? Yes, Please!": How to Read Slavoj Žižek's Less Than Nothing—Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism / Adrian Johnston 7
2. How to Repeat Plato?: For a Platonism of the Non-All / Frank Ruda 43
3. Materialism between Critique and Speculation / Samo Tomšic 58
4. Žižek's Reading Machine / Benjamin Noys 72
5. The Shift of the Gaze in Žižek's Philosophical Writing / Katja Kolšek 84
6. The Two Cats: Žižek, Derrida, and Other Animals / Oxana Timofeeva 100
Part II. Psychoanalysis
7. "Father, Don't You See I'm Burning?": Žižek, Psychoanalysis, and the Apocalypse / Catherine Malabou 113
8. Enjoy Your Truth: Lacan as Vanishing Mediator between Badiou and Žižek / Bruno Bosteels 127
9. The Discourse of the Wild Analyst / Henrik Jøker Bjerre and Brian Benjamin Hansen 146
10. "Vers un Significant Nouveau": Our Task after Lacan / Gabriel Tupinambá 159
11. Mourning or Melancholia? Collapse of Capitalism and Delusional Attachments / Fabio Vighi 180
Part III. Politics
12. Žižek with Marx: Outside in the Critique of Political Economy / Gavin Walker 195
13. Žižek as a Reader of Marx, Marx as a Reader of Žižek / Geoff Pfeifer 213
14. A Plea for Žižekian Politics / Agon Hamza 226
Part IV. Religion
15. The Problem of Christianity and Žižek's "Middle Period" / Adam Kotsko 243
16. Islam: How Could It Have Emerged After Christianity? / Sead Zimeri 256
Afterword. The Minimal Event: From Hystericization to Subjective Destitution / Slavoj Žižek 269
Contributors 287
Index 291
What People are Saying About This
"Repeating Žižek's new engagements with the work of Slavoj Žižek are serious and refreshing. The essays take up the most pressing questions Žižek's work poses. Whereas other discussions of him endlessly discuss his jokes, style, and embrace of popular culture, the essays collected here pursue philosophical, psychoanalytic, and political questions. From the outset, Agon Hamza's insistence on treating Žižek's thought as a philosophical system sweeps aside the interpretive clutter that has plagued Žižek's interpretation for over twenty years. Finally, we can get some work done."
"A truly excellent collection. The authors are not Žižek followers but members of an independent intellectual fellowship that takes seriously the claim that Žižek offers the world what Badiou calls a 'new topology.'"