The Most Sublime Hysteric E-Book

Slavoj Zizek

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 505

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

What do we know about Hegel? What do we know about Marx? What do we know about democracy and totalitarianism? Communism and psychoanalysis? What do we know that isn't a platitude that we've heard a thousand times - or a self-satisfied certainty? Through his brilliant reading of Hegel, Slavoj Zizek - one of the most provocative and widely-read thinkers of our time - upends our traditional understanding, dynamites every cliché and undermines every conviction in order to clear the ground for new ways of answering these questions.

When Lacan described Hegel as the ‘most sublime hysteric’, he was referring to the way that the hysteric asks questions because he experiences his own desire as if it were the Other's desire. In the dialectical process, the question asked of the Other is resolved through a reflexive turn in which the question begins to function as its own answer. We had made Hegel into the theorist of abstraction and reaction, but by reading Hegel with Lacan, Zizek unveils a Hegel of the concrete and of revolution - his own, and the one to come.

This early and dazzlingly original work by Zizek offers a unique insight into the ideas which have since become hallmarks of his mature thought. It will be of great interest to anyone interested in critical theory, philosophy and contemporary social thought.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Introduction: Impossible Absolute Knowledge

Book I: Hegel with Lacan

1: “The Formal Aspect”: Reason versus Understanding

The story of an appearance

Wanting to say and saying

Zeno's paradoxes

Truth as loss of the object

2: The Retroactive Performative, or How the Necessary Emerges from the Contingent

One-grain-more, one-hair-less

The Witz of the synthesis

Hegel and the contingent

Necessity as a retroactive effect

From king to bureaucracy

3: The Dialectic as Logic of the Signifier (1): The One of Self-Reference

The “quilting point” [“point de capiton”]

The dialectical return-to-the-self

The universal as exception

The subjectified structure

The Hegelian “one One”

4: The Dialectic as Logic of the Signifier (2): The Real of the “Triad”

Lalangue and its boundary

Coincidentia oppositorum

The missed encounter is the object

Forbidding the impossible

Thesis-antithesis-synthesis

5: Das Ungeschehenmachen: How is Lacan a Hegelian?

The three stages of the symbolic

Das Ungeschehenmachen

Crime and punishment

The “beautiful soul”

6: The “Cunning of Reason,” or the True Nature of the Hegelian Teleology

Failure in Austen

The Hegelian subject versus the Fichtean subject

The “reconciliation”

“The spirit is a bone”

“Wealth is the self”

7: “The Suprasensible is the Phenomenon as Phenomenon,” or How Hegel Goes Beyond the Kantian Thing-in-Itself

Kant and McCullough

The ne explétif

“The suprasensible is the phenomenon as phenomenon”

8: Two Hegelian Witz, Which Help Us Understand Why Absolute Knowledge Is Divisive

The signifying reflection

The other's lack

The symbolic act

“… that integral void that we also call the sacred”

How “Absolute Knowledge” is divisive

Book II: Post-Hegelian Impasses

9: The Secret of the Commodity Form: Why is Marx the Inventor of the Symptom?

Marx, Freud: the analysis of form

The commodity form in the unconscious

Marx, inventor of the symptom

Fetish and commodity

The “subjects who supposedly …”

10: Ideology Between the Dream and the Phantasy: A First Attempt at Defining “Totalitarianism”

The Real in ideology

Surplus jouissance [plus-de-jouir] and surplus value

The totalitarian phantasy, the totalitarianism of phantasy

11: Divine Psychosis, Political Psychosis: A Second Attempt at Defining “Totalitarianism”

“Argue … but obey!”

The obscenity of the form

Kant with Kafka

“The Law is the Law”

Forced choice

Radical evil

Divine prehistory

12: Between Two Deaths: Third, and Final, Attempt at Defining “Totalitarianism”

The second death

Benjamin: revolution as repetition

The “perspective of the last judgment”

The totalitarian body

“The People does not exist”

13: The Quilting Point of Ideology: Or Why Lacan is Not a “Poststructuralist”

The “arbitrariness” of the signifier

The One and the impossible

Lacan versus “poststructuralism”

“There is no metalanguage”

14: Naming and Contingency: Hegel and Analytic Philosophy

Kripke the Hegelian

Descriptivism versus anti-descriptivism

Speech acts, real acts

The impossible performative

I and a

References

Index

First published in French as Le plus sublime des hystériques. Hegel avec Lacan © Presses Universitaires de France, 2011

This English edition © Polity Press, 2014

This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme.

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Introduction: Impossible Absolute Knowledge

Foucault once suggested that we define philosophy as such with anti-Platonism. Precisely because Plato was the thinker whose work cleared the ground for the field of philosophy, every philosopher, beginning with Aristotle, would define his project by distancing himself from Plato. In a similar way, we can think of philosophy in the last two centuries as defined by taking distance from Hegel. Hegel is the incarnation of the “panlogical” monster, the total dialectical mediation of reality, the total dissolution of reality in the self-movement of the Idea. Faced with this monster, various ideas have been advanced that would supposedly be capable of escaping the mediation of the concept. This procedure is already visible in the three great post-Hegelian reversals that opposed the absolutism of the Idea in the name of the irrational abyss of the Will (Schelling), in the name of the paradox of individual existence (Kierkegaard), and in the name of the productive process of life (Marx). When siding with Hegel, even the most favorable commentators refuse to step over the line into accepting Absolute Knowledge. Thus, Jean Hyppolite emphasized that the post-Hegelian experience permitted the irreducible opening of the historico-temporal process through an empty repetition that destroyed the framework of the progress of Reason. Even among partisans of Hegel, their relationship to the Hegelian system is always one of “Of course, but still …” – of course Hegel affirmed the fundamentally antagonistic character of effectivity, the de-centering of the subject, etc., but still … ; this fissure is finally canceled through the self-mediation of the Absolute Idea that heals all wounds. The position of Absolute Knowledge, of the final reconciliation, plays the role of the Hegelian Thing. It is the monster that is both frightening and ridiculous, from which one would do best to keep one's distance. It is both impossible (Absolute Knowledge is, of course, unattainable, an unrealizable Ideal!) and forbidden (Absolute Knowledge is terrifying, because it threatens mortification of all the richness of the living through the self-movement of the concept!). In other words, any identification with Hegelian thought implies a moment where this identification will break down – the Thing must always be sacrificed.

For us, this image of Hegel as “panlogicist,” devouring and mortifying the living substance of the particular, is the Real of his critics. “Real” in the Lacanian sense: the construction of a point that does not actually exist (a monster unrelated to Hegel himself) but that, nonetheless, must be presupposed in order to legitimate our position through negative reference to the other, by distancing ourselves. Where does this terror that grips the post-Hegelians in the face of the monster of Absolute Knowledge come from? What is concealed in the fascinating presence of this phantasmic construction? A hole, an empty space. It is possible to define this hole by undertaking the reading of Hegel with Lacan, which is to say against the background of the Lacanian problematic of the lack in the Other, the traumatic emptiness around which the signifying process articulates itself. From this perspective, Absolute Knowledge reveals itself to be the Hegelian name for what Lacan attempted to pin down with the term “the pass” [la passe], the final moment of the analytical process, the experience of the Lack in the Other. If, according to Lacan's famous formulation, Sade gives us the truth of Kant, then Lacan himself could give us access to the fundamental matrix that gives the movement of the Hegelian dialectic its structure; Kant with Sade, Hegel with Lacan. What then is the relationship between Hegel and Lacan?

Today, things seem clear-cut. While no one denies that Lacan owes a certain debt to Hegel, at the same time it is widely accepted that Hegel's influence was limited to certain theoretical borrowings, which occurred during a very fixed time frame. Between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, Lacan attempted to articulate the psychoanalytic process in the terms of the intersubjective logic of the recognition of desire and/or the desire for recognition. Already at this time, Lacan had taken care to distance himself from the closure of the Hegelian system, from the Absolute Knowledge that he associated with the inaccessible ideal of a perfectly homogenous discourse, complete and sealed in upon itself. Later on, the introduction of the logic of the pas-tout* and the concept of the barred Other would render this initial reference to Hegel obsolete. Is it possible to imagine a more incompatible contradiction than between Hegelian Absolute Knowledge – the sealed “circle of circles” – and the Lacanian barred Other – knowledge as irrevocably lacking? Is Lacan not the anti-Hegel par excellence?

It is the critiques of Lacan in particular that bring out his debt to Hegel. Lacan has been criticized for remaining a prisoner of logo-phallocentrism, allegedly because of an underlying Hegelianism that confined textual dissemination within the teleological circle. In response to this critique, Lacanians reply, as they will, by drawing attention to Lacan's break with Hegelianism, struggling to save Lacan by emphasizing that he is not and was never a Hegelian. Now is the moment to take on this debate in a novel way, by articulating the relationship between Hegel and Lacan in an unprecedented manner. To my eyes, Lacan was fundamentally Hegelian, but did not know it. His Hegelianism is not to be found where we might expect it to be, in his overt references to Hegel, but rather in the final stage of his teachings, in the logic of the pas-tout, in the importance he placed on the Real, on the Lack in the Other. And, reciprocally, a reading of Hegel through the lens of Lacan gives us a picture of Hegel that is radically different from the commonly accepted view of him as a “panlogicist.” It will bring out a Hegel of the logic of the “signifier,” of a self-referential process articulated as the repeated positivation of a central Void.

This reading changes the very definitions of the two terms involved. It washes away the alluvium of panlogicism and/or historicism and uncovers a Hegel of the logic of the signifier. On the other side, it makes it possible to isolate the most subversive of the core elements of Lacanian doctrine, that of the constitutive Lack in the Other. This is why this book is, at its roots, dialogical: it is impossible to develop a positive line of thinking without including the theses that are opposed to it. In this case, these are the commonplaces regarding Hegel that I've already mentioned, which see Hegelianism as the quintessential example of the “imperialism of reason,” a closed economy in which the self-movement of the Concept sublates all the differences and dispersions of the material process. Similar commonplaces can be found in Lacan. But these are accompanied by a different conception of Hegel, one that is not found in Lacan's direct references to Hegel – which is why I will, for the most part, ignore these references. In my reading, Lacan “did not know where he was a Hegelian,” because his reading of Hegel followed in the tradition of Kojève and Hyppolite. Therefore, in order to articulate the link between the logic of the dialectic and of the “signifier,” we must, for the time being, put aside all of Lacan's explicit references to Hegel.

It seems that today the terms themselves of the philosophical debate have changed. The debate no longer draws on the “poststructuralist” themes of de-centering the subject, but rather on a kind of renewal of the Political (human rights, critiques of totalitarianism) through a theoretical return to a position that could generally be described, in its various different forms (up to and including Habermas's communicative ethics), as Kantian. This return to Kant has allowed for philosophy to be rehabilitated, rescuing it from “symptomal readings” that had reduced it to an ideological-imaginary effect and conferring a new credibility on philosophical reflection, while still avoiding the “totalitarianism of Reason” (which it identifies with post-Kantian idealism), which is to say, while still keeping the horizon of historical progress open. And so, the second part of this work will develop an implicit dialogue with this point of view, at several levels, through references to three fields of philosophy.

First of all, the Kantian field itself. Starting with Lacan, I will describe the dimension of Kant that has not figured in the renewal of his thinking, the Kant whose truth is Sade, the Kant whose impossible superego imperative hides the injunction to jouissance,* the Kant who was radicalized by Schelling in his theory of original Evil.

Second, owing to the influence of the return to Kantian philosophy, Marx has been largely forgotten. What can we salvage from Marx after the experience of “totalitarianism”? There remains the man who invented the symptom (as Lacan argued in the “RSI” seminar), who can help us understand the fundamentally unconscious nature of ideology, the relationship of the symptom to the fantasy, and so on.

Third, according to received doxa, analytic philosophy is the radical opposite of Hegel. However, I will argue that this novel understanding of the core of the Hegelian dialectic is more present in certain strains of analytic philosophy (Kripke's anti-descriptivism, for example) than it is in the different versions of straight Hegelianism.

Using this three-part dialogue as its base, the second part of this book will sketch the outlines of a Lacanian theory of the politico-ideological field that will allow us to diagnose the phenomenon that has been labeled “totalitarian,” while at the same time pinning down the fundamentally paradoxical nature of democracy.

The final thesis of this book is that Lacanian doctrine contains the framework for a theory of the politico-ideological field. This framework has not been fully fleshed out, and this is one of the great enigmas of contemporary thought. Perhaps the solution to this great enigma coincides with the solution of another: why has the true character of Lacan's Hegelianism been consistently misrecognized?*

This book presents the re-edited text of the doctoral thesis “Philosophy Between the Symptom and the Fantasy,” completed under the direction of Jacques-Alain Miller and defended in November 1982 in the Psychoanalysis Department of the Université de Paris-VIII. I extend my thanks to Professor Miller and other colleagues in the Freudian field who provided their support for this work.

Notes

*    Pas-tout is often translated as “not-all” or “not-whole,” and although the latter comes closer, it doesn't quite capture the meaning of the French original, which contains elements of both.

*    Although it could be roughly translated as enjoyment, jouissance is a more specific term with a sexual connotation. For a more in-depth discussion of how to translate the term, see Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2002), p. 150. Evans defines jouissance as “an excessive quantity of excitation which the pleasure principle attempts to prevent.”

*    I have generally translated méconnaissance (literally mis-knowledge) as “misrecognition,” and also once or twice as “misunderstanding,” depending on the context. Although it is often left untranslated, it seems not to lose anything essential in its translation. For a more in-depth discussion, see Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, p. 112.

Book I

Hegel with Lacan

1

“The Formal Aspect”: Reason versus Understanding

The story of an appearance

The first “materialist inversion of Hegel”? It can be pinpointed precisely: Nuremberg's central square, May 2, 1828. On that date, a peculiarly dressed young man appears in downtown Nuremberg. His countenance and his gestures are markedly stiff. The only words he knows are a few fragments of the Lord's Prayer that he has memorized and an enigmatic – and slightly ungrammatical – sentence: “I would be a horseman, like my father was,” the first hint of an identification with an Ego-Ideal. In his left hand, he holds a paper bearing his name – Kaspar Hauser – and the address of a cavalry captain in Nuremberg. Once he learns to speak, Kaspar tells his story. He had spent his life alone in a “dark cellar” where a “man in black” brought him food and water, until the day when this man brought him to Nuremberg, teaching him along the way the few sentences Kaspar knew.

Placed in the care of the Daumer family, Kaspar was quickly “humanized,” learned to speak “properly,” and became a celebrity. He was the subject of philosophical, psychological, pedagogical, and medical interest, as well as the focus of political speculation as to his origins. After a few years of quiet life, he was found on the afternoon of December 14, 1833, with a fatal stab wound. On his deathbed, he claimed that his assailant was the “man in black” who had brought him to Nuremberg (see Hörisch 1979). Although Kaspar's sudden appearance provoked a brutal encounter with an “impossible-reality” that ruptured the symbolic circuit of cause and effect, the most surprising thing was that, in a certain sense, the moment was awaiting him. As a surprise, he “arrived right on time.” Kaspar was an incarnation of the age-old myth of the child of royal descent abandoned in the wilderness and then found as an adolescent, and the rumor soon spread that he was the Prince of Baden. The fact that the only objects he remembered from the cellar were a few toy animals carved from wood was itself a poignant re-enactment of the myth of a hero who is rescued and cared for by animals. But above all, toward the end of the eighteenth century the theme of the child living outside of human society had become the subject of an ever-increasing number of literary and scientific works, as the pure embodiment of the distinction between the “nature” and “culture” of man.

Kaspar's emergence was, from a “material” point of view, the result of a series of unexpected accidents. But from the formal point of view, it was fundamentally necessary; the structure of contemporary knowledge had prepared a space for him. Because this empty space had already been constructed, his appearance caused a sensation, whereas a century before or after it would have passed unnoticed. To grasp this form, this empty space that precedes the content that will come to fill it, is the work of Reason in the Hegelian sense. That is to say, Reason as opposed to Understanding, in which the form expresses a positive and predetermined content. In other words, far from being overtaken by his “materialist inversions,” Hegel is the one who, ahead of time, gave them their meaning.

Wanting to say and saying

According to orthodox dialectics, Understanding supposedly treats categories, conceptual determinates, as abstract moments, frozen and removed from the living totality, reduced to the specificity of their fixed identity. Reason, on the other hand, goes beyond the level of Understanding by deploying the living process of subjective (self-)mediation whose “dead” and rigid abstract moments, whose “objectifications,” are the categories of Understanding. Where Understanding sees only rigid categories, Reason sees the living movement that generates them. The Understanding/Reason distinction is therefore seen through the Bergsonian opposition between the flexible, moveable, vital force and the inert matter it produces that is accessible to Understanding.

A view such as this completely misses the true significance of the distinction between Understanding and Reason. Reason is not something “in addition” to Understanding, a movement, a living process that escapes from the dead skeleton of the categories of Understanding. Reason is Understanding itself in the sense that nothing is missing from Understanding, in the sense that there is nothing beyond it. It is the absolute form outside of which there exists no content. We remain at the level of Understanding so long as we think there is something “beyond” it, a force that eludes Understanding, an unknown inaccessible to the “rigid schematics” of the categories of Understanding – and so long as we give the name “Reason” to this beyond! By making this step toward Reason, we are not adding anything to Understanding; rather, we are subtracting something from it (the phantom of the object that persists beyond the form). We are reducing it to its formal process. We “go beyond” Understanding when we recognize that Understanding is already in itself the living movement of self-mediation that we were searching for outside of it.

Already, this can help us to correct a misunderstanding of the Hegelian critique of “abstract thought” (cf. Hegel 1966).

All that is usually retained from this critique is the idea that common sense, Understanding, proceeds by abstraction, by subsuming all of an object's richness under a specific determination. A feature of a concrete network is picked out from the fullness of the living – a man, for example, is identified by the determination “thief” or “traitor” – and the dialectical approach is supposed to compensate for this loss, by allowing us to return to the richness of the concrete living world. But, as Gérard Lebrun (1972) has pointed out, this is not the case: once we're in the domain of logos, the loss is irremediable – what is lost is lost. To use Lacan's words, once we've spoken, the gap between the Real and its symbolization is irreducible. But instead of bemoaning this loss, Hegel's fundamental move is to praise this incredible power of Understanding, this capacity to “abstract,” to divide up the immediate unity of the living world:

The action of separating the elements is the exercise of the force of Understanding, the most astonishing and greatest of all powers, or rather the absolute power. The circle, which is self-enclosed and at rest, and, qua substance, holds its own moments, is an immediate relation, the immediate, continuous relation of elements with their unity, and hence arouses no sense of wonderment. But that an accident as such, when cut loose from its containing circumference, – that what is bound and held by something else and actual only by being connected with it, – should obtain an existence all its own, gain freedom and independence on its own account – this is the portentous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of pure ego. (Hegel 1977: 23)

To put this another way, the concreteness of thought is completely different from the immediate concreteness of the fullness of the living. The “progress” of dialectical thought in regard to Understanding is in no way the reappropriation of this pre-linguistic richness; rather, it can be reduced to the experience of its fundamental nullity – the richness that is lost through symbolization is already in itself something ephemeral. The error of Understanding is not that it wants to reduce the richness of the living to the abstract determinations of thought. Its great error is the very opposition between the richness of the concrete and the abstractness of the network of symbolic determinations, the belief in an original fullness of the concrete living world that supposedly escapes the network of symbolic determinations. Those worn-out formulations, according to which Reason puts the rigid categories of Understanding “in movement” and introduces dialectical dynamism, lead to a misunderstanding: far from “passing beyond the limits of Understanding,” Reason marks the point of reduction where all the content of thought is immanent within Understanding. The categories of Understanding “become fluid,” and “dialectical movement” is introduced when we no longer think of them as frozen moments, as “objectifications” of a living process that is always overflowing from them – that is to say, when we locate their motive force in the immanence of their own contradiction.

“Contradiction as the agent of dialectical movement” has once again become a platitude that is often used to sidestep efforts to give an exact definition of this contradiction. Therefore we must ask: what is, in a strict sense, the “contradiction” that “pushes” the dialectical process forward?

An initial approach would be to say that it is the contradiction of universality with itself, with its own specific content. Among the specific elements of each universal totality, posited as a thesis, there will necessarily be “at least one” that negates the universal trait defining the totality in question. This is the “symptomal point,” the element that, from within the field of this universality, serves as its outside, a point of exclusion from which the field establishes itself. Therefore, we do not compare the universality of a thesis to a Truth-in-Itself to which it supposedly corresponds; we compare it with itself, with its own concrete content. Exploring the concrete content of a universal thesis subverts it retroactively, out of the structural necessity of an element that “extrudes” and that functions as its constitutive exception. Take Marx's Capital: a society of private property in which individual producers are themselves owners of the means of production, when developed fully, to its radical conclusion, gives us its immanent negation, capitalism, which implies the expropriation of the majority of producers who are forced to sell their own labor in the marketplace, rather than the fruit of their labor; and then, capitalism, developed all the way to its radical conclusion, gives us socialism (the expropriation of the expropriators themselves).

Second, we must specify the character of this comparison of universality to itself, to its concrete content. Ultimately, it is a matter of the comparison of what the subject who uttered a universal thesis wanted to say and what he really said. One subverts a universal thesis in such a way as to show the subject who formulated it how, by his own formulation, he was saying something completely different from what he “wanted to say.” As Hegel makes clear, the most difficult thing in the world is to utter, to articulate, what one “really said” by formulating a proposition. The most basic form of this dialectical subversion of a proposition by self-reference – by putting the proposition in the context of its own formulation – can be seen in Hegel's treatment of the proposition of identity. The subject “wants to say” that identity has nothing to do with difference, that it is something radically other than difference. But by doing this, he says the precise opposite of what he wanted to say; he determines identity as radically different from difference. As a result, difference is inscribed into the core itself, into the identity itself of identity:

It is thus to an empty identity that they cling, those who take it to be something true, insisting that identity is not difference but that the two are different. They do not see that in saying, “Identity is different from difference,” they have thereby already said that identity is something different. (Hegel 2010: 358)

This is why, for Hegel, truth is always on the side of what one says and not what one “intended to say.” Already in the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the case of “sense certainty,” the literalness of the spoken subverts the intention of signification (the consciousness “wanted to say” an absolutely specific here-and-now, but, in fact, it spoke the greatest abstraction, any here-and-now whatsoever). Hegel knows that we always say too much or else too little, always something else, as opposed to what we wanted to say. This discord is the energy that powers the dialectical movement; it is this discord that subverts every proposition.

This crucial distinction between what the subject “wants to say,” what he “thinks [meint],” and what he “actually says” – a distinction that corresponds perfectly to Lacan's distinction between signification and signifiance* – can be explained in relation to the dialectic of essence and appearance. “For us,” for the dialectical consciousness that observes the process afterwards, the essence is the appearance as appearance [die Erscheinung als Erscheinung], which is to say the movement of appearance's self-transcendence, the movement through which appearance is posited as such, as something that, in fact, “is only appearance.” However, “for the consciousness,” for the subject caught in the process, essence is something beyond appearance, a substantial entity hidden by deceptive appearances. The “signification” of the essence, what the subject “wants to say” when he speaks of essence, is therefore an entity that transcends appearance. But what he “actually says,” the “signifiance,” can be reduced to the movement of the self-abolition of appearance. Appearance does not have its own substance; it is a chimerical entity continually in the process of dissolving itself. The “signifiance” of essence can therefore be reduced to the path traveled by the subject, to the process through which appearance becomes for him appearance of the Essence.

An exemplary instance of this dialectic can be seen in the Hegelian interpretation of the aporias that Zeno of Elea tried to use to demonstrate the non-existence of movement and of the Many. Zeno “wanted to say,” of course, that movement does not exist, that all that exists is the One, being that is unchanging, indivisible, etc. But what he in fact demonstrated was the contradictory nature of movement; movement exists only through self-dissolution, which is not the same thing as saying that there is no movement. The crucial point here is to capture the self-referential character of movement. Movement coincides with (the movement of) its own dissolution. The infinite One, the unchanging Absolute, is not an entity that transcends the multitude of the finite; it is instead the absolute, self-referential movement, the movement itself of the self-dissolution of the finite, the Many.

Zeno's paradoxes

The paradoxes employed by Zeno in his attempt to disprove the hypothesis of movement and the existence of the Many – which is to say, that he uses to prove the existence of the One, of unchanging being, via the absurd consequences that result from the affirmation of movement – are especially interesting from the point of view of our argument. Jean-Claude Milner's brilliant “fictional detective work” (Milner 1985) showed us that Zeno's four arguments (Achilles and the tortoise, the arrow in flight, the Dichotomy, the stadium) were arrived at not through a purely formal logical approach, but rather through a kind of literary technique. Let us examine the exact nature of the literary examples that served as reference points for Zeno. Take the most famous paradox, that of Achilles trying in vain to capture the tortoise (or Hector). According to Milner, the paradox is drawn from the following passage of The Iliad:

As a man in a dream who fails to lay hands upon another whom he is pursuing – the one cannot escape nor the other overtake – even so neither could Achilles come up with Hector, nor Hector break away from Achilles. (Homer 1999: 264)

How can we not recognize in the paradoxical relationship of the subject to the object the well-known dream in which one is continually approaching an object that remains eternally out of reach? As Lacan already pointed out, the object is inaccessible not because Achilles cannot pass the tortoise (he can overtake the tortoise and leave it behind him), but because he cannot reach it. The object is a limit that is never reached, located between a “too early” and a “too late” – reminiscent of the well-known paradox of happiness in Brecht's Threepenny Opera; by pursuing happiness in too ardent a manner, we overtake it and leave it behind. The topology of this paradox is the paradoxical topology of the object of desire that escapes us, that draws away at our very approach. Similar literary contexts can easily be found in Zeno's other paradoxes. For the paradox of the arrow in flight, which cannot be in motion because at each moment it occupies a specific point in space, Milner finds the model in this description of Heracles in The Odyssey:

He looked black as night with his bare bow in his hands and his arrow on the string, glaring around as though ever on the point of taking aim … naked bow in his grip, an arrow grooved on the bowstring, glaring round him fiercely, forever poised to shoot. (Homer 2012: 178)

Heracles fires and the arrow flies, but in a perpetually repeated manner, in such a way that it is continually beginning its movement over again, and, in this sense, remains immobile through its very movement. Once again, we cannot miss the connection with a very common dream experience – that of “immobile movement” in which, despite your frenzied activity, you remain in some way blocked, immobile, stuck in a fixed point, where, through your very movement itself, you seem “not to move.” You are constantly repeating the same gesture, and even though the act is accomplished again and again, its effect is canceled out. As Milner notes, the location in which this episode occurs is not insignificant: it takes place in the Underworld, where Ulysses encounters a whole series of famous tortured figures who are doomed to continually repeat the same action again and again: Tantalus, Sisyphus, etc. For the time being, we can leave aside the figure of Tantalus, whose torture is the physical embodiment of the Lacanian distinction between need and demand (in satisfying one's need to drink, one does not satisfy the demand that is contained within thirst, and this is why thirst persists into infinity). The “rock of Sisyphus” is directly relevant to our theme:

With hands and feet he tried to roll it up to the top of the hill, but always, just before he could roll it over on to the other side, its weight would be too much for him, and the pitiless stone would come thundering down again on to the plain. (Homer 2012: 177–8)

This is the literary reference point for the third paradox, called the “Dichotomy”: one can never cross distance X, because, before doing so, one must travel half of this distance, etc., on to infinity. The goal (in Sisyphus' case, the top of the hill) becomes further away once reached and moves again; the whole path, once traveled, is revealed to be only the half of it. The actual goal of Sisyphus' activity is the path itself, the circular movement that consists in pushing the rock uphill and letting it roll back down. It is clear that here we have the basic framework of a drive, with its pulsation and its circular movement. The true aim of a drive is not its stated goal: it is nothing more than “the return into the circuit of the drive” (Lacan 1998a: 178). And the final paradox:

two rows of bodies, each row being composed of an equal number of bodies of equal size, passing each other on a race-course as they proceed with equal velocity in opposite directions, the one row originally occupying the space between the goal and the middle point of the course and the other that between the middle point and the starting-post … half a given time is equal to double that time. (Aristotle 2006: 87)

Or, to quote Plato's general formulation: “the half is worth more than the whole” (Plato 1992: 141). Where can we find such an experience, in which the influence of an object is reinforced and increased as it is diminished – the more it diminishes, the more important the remaining part becomes? Consider the way in which the figure of the Jew – the quintessential libidinal object – functioned in Nazi discourse: “the more we eliminate and destroy them, the more dangerous the rest become. …” The more we attempt to repel the horrifying object of desire, the more it looms, frightening, in front of the subject.

The general conclusion we can draw from this is that there is a domain in which the paradoxes of Zeno take on their full value, a domain that operates in a perfectly homologous way to Zeno's paradoxes of movement themselves. This is the domain of the object of desire, of the “impossible” relationship of the subject to the object-cause of his desire and the compulsion that circles around this object. The topology of Zeno's paradoxes is that of the relationship of the subject to the object-cause of his desire. The domain ruled out by Zeno – I am even tempted to say foreclosed – as “impossible” in order to establish the reign of the One, is the Real of compulsion and the object that it circles around. Omitting the object a is constitutive of the field philosophy as such: “the object is the one lacking in philosophical consideration in order to situate itself, that is: in order to know that it is nothing” (Lacan 1987: 110). This is why the paradoxes Zeno used in order to prove the impossibility of movement and from there its non-existence are the other side of the existence of the One, of what Parmenides – the “first philosopher” – called unchanging Being.

The object a is simultaneously the purest semblance, a chimera “without substance,” the fragile positivation of nothingness, and also the Real, the hard kernel, the rock upon which symbolization is dashed. This explains the paradox of philosophy: philosophy lacks the Real because of its very attempt to find true being through exclusion, through ruling out false appearance [semblance], which is to say, by setting about drawing the line of separation between true being and the semblant. The lack of consideration given to the Real core takes the paradoxical form of the fear of being taken in by false appearances, of succumbing to the power of the semblant. The pure semblant appears horrifying, because it announces a Real that threatens to explode the ontological consistency of the universe.

To bring this back to Hegel, we can reformulate his reading of Zeno's paradoxes in the following way: Zeno's “intention” is to exclude the paradoxical circuit of compulsion, the paradoxical nature of the object a that grows through its very own diminution, that keeps its distance through our very approach. However, what he “actually does” is define in a very neat and concise way the paradoxical topology of the impossible-Real object, the phantasmic relationship of the subject to the object-cause of desire ($ ◊ a).

Truth as loss of the object

This Hegelian reading of Zeno demonstrates the fundamental error of the standard view of the in-itself [An-sich] category. The in-itself is normally thought of as the transcendental substantial content that eludes consciousness and therefore, according to the Kantian model of the thing-in-itself, has not yet been “mediated” by it. To return to Zeno, what is the in-itself of his argument? Zeno takes his argument to be a reductio proof of the existence of unchanging being, which persists in itself beyond the misleading appearance of movement. And so already, “for the consciousness” (for Zeno himself), there is a difference between what is only “for it,” for the ordinary consciousness, and what exists “in itself.” Movement is a false appearance that only exists for the naive, pre-philosophical consciousness, while “in itself,” there only exists unique and unchanging being. This is the first correction we must make to the aforementioned standard view: the difference between what is “for it (the consciousness)” and what exists “in itself” is a distinction that takes place within the “naive” consciousness itself. The Hegelian subversion consists only in relocating this distinction and showing that it is not where the “naive” (or, “critical,” which is nothing more than the supreme form of naivety) consciousness posits it.

“For the consciousness,” for Zeno, there is a distinction between the contradictory, self-dissolving appearance of movement and unchanging being, unique, identical to itself, existing in itself. Zeno's “truth,” his “in-itself-for-us,” is that the entire content of unchanging being, all that Zeno “actually says,” can be reduced to the movement of movement's self-sublation. Unchanging being, beyond appearance, is the process of movement's self-dissolution through contradiction. This is the crucial point: “for the consciousness,” for Zeno, this argumentative approach is fundamentally exterior to the “thing-itself,” it is only our path to the One, to unchanging being that is supposed to persist in-itself, unaffected by our methods – to use the well-known metaphor, it is like the ladder that we kick away after using it. “For us,” on the other hand, the entire content of being resides in the argumentative path that brought us to it; “for us,” unchanging being is only an objectification, a fixed figuration of the method through which we came to see movement as misleading appearance. The passage from that which is only “for the consciousness” to the “in itself or for us” is therefore in no way a passage from misleading, superficial appearance into the Beyond that exists in itself. On the contrary, it is a question of recognizing that what the consciousness took to be a path toward the truth, exterior to the truth (Zeno's argumentative approach, for example), is already the truth itself.

In a certain sense, “everything is in the consciousness.” The true In-itself is not hidden in some transcendent Beyond. The error of the consciousness consists entirely in failing to notice that what it took for a procedure exterior to the object is already the object-itself. Here we can see the whole weight of the category of the “formal aspect [das Formelle]” introduced by Hegel in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of the Spirit. The truth of a moment in the dialectical process consists in its form itself, in the formal procedure, in the path by which the consciousness reached it:

The content, however, of what presents itself to us does exist for it [for the consciousness]; we comprehend only the formal aspect of that content, or its pure origination. For it, what has thus arisen exists only as an object; for us, it appears at the same time as movement and a process of becoming. (Hegel 1977: 56)

Contrary to the classical representation of an external form that supposedly obscures the true content, the dialectical approach conceives of the content itself as a “fetish,” an objective given whose inert presence hides its true form. The truth of Eleatic Being is the formal approach that demonstrated the inconsistency of movement. That is why the Hegelian dialectic implies the experience of the fundamental nullity of the “content” – meaning this X, this core of the in-itself that we supposedly approach through the formal procedure. We must come to recognize in X an upside-down effect of the formal process itself. If Hegel criticized Kant for his formalism, it's because he was not “formalist” enough, which is to say, because he retained the postulate of an In-itself that supposedly escapes the transcendental form, not realizing that this was in fact a pure “thing-of-the-mind.”

The dialectical path toward the “Truth” of an object therefore implies the experience of its loss. The object, its rigid form, dissolve into the network of “mediations,” of formal procedures. That the dialectical “truth” of an object consists in the network of its mediations is nothing new – but, as a rule, people forget the other side of the immediacy of the object's passage toward the network of its mediations: the loss of the object. By grasping the “Truth” of Eleatic Being as the movement itself of the demonstration of the non-existence, the self-dissolution of movement, we lose “being” as an entity existing in itself. In place of Being – a fixed reference point, identical to itself – all that remains is the vertiginous movement of the bottomless maelstrom, the self-dissolution of movement, a procedure that at first seemed to be an exterior path to being. This is Heraclitus as the “truth” of Parmenides (see Dolar 1986).

And it was the concept of truth itself that Hegel famously reversed: truth does not consist in the correspondence of our thought (the proposition, the concept) to the thing (the object), but rather the correspondence of the object itself to the concept. Heidegger (2002) replied that this reversal remained trapped in the same metaphysical framework of truth as correspondence. But what escaped from Heidegger's critique was the radically non-symmetrical character of the Hegelian reversal. For Hegel, we are dealing with three elements, not just two. “Knowledge,” the dual relationship between “thought” and its “object,” is replaced by the triangle of (subjective) thought, the object and the concept that is in no way the same thing as thought. We might say that the concept is in fact the form of the thought, form in the strictly dialectical sense of the “formal aspect” as the truth of the “content.” That which remains “un-thought” [impensé] in a thought is not a transcendental surplus, an unseizable X of its objectual “content,” but its form itself. The encounter between an object and its concept (concept in a strictly dialectical sense, not some abstract-universal Platonic Idea) is therefore necessarily a missed encounter. The object can never correspond to its concept, because its existence, its very consistency, depends on this non-correspondence. “The object” itself, as a fixed, inert point, that is to say, as a non-dialecticized presence, is in a certain sense non-truth incarnate and, as a point, plugs the hole in the truth. This is why the path to the truth of an object entails its loss, the dissolution of its ontological consistency.

Note

*    Here I have left the French word “significance” in its original form, although it has also been translated as “signifierness,” “signifyingness,” or “meaningfulness.” For a more in-depth discussion of the various translations of the term, see Lacan 2006: 318.

2

The Retroactive Performative, or How the Necessary Emerges from the Contingent

One-grain-more, one-hair-less

Doesn't the dialectical procedure entail the total dissolution of the positive object into the absolute form of the concept? And isn't this dissolution simply Hegelian “panlogicism” in action? Such hasty reasoning overlooks the fact that the Hegelian concept of totality is fundamentally pas-tout; there must always be a “grain of sand” that functions as a foreign body. What is this grain? It is, of course, the same one as in the paradoxes of one-grain-more and one-hair-less. Which grain is it that makes a collection of grains of sand a pile? Which hair is the one whose removal makes someone bald? The only possible answer involves inverting the Lacanian concept of “anticipated certainty.” That what we have in front of us is already a pile is something that can only be recognized too late, after the fact – the moment can never be quite right. At a particular moment, we simply recognize that what we have in front of us was, at least one grain earlier, a pile. In other words, the validity of our observation is retroactive; it remains true if we remove a grain, if we add a hair … Why is this? What we are dealing with here are symbolic determinations, which refuse to be reduced to descriptions of positive traits, positive properties, which always involve a certain distance from positive reality. A symbolic determination (“pile,” for example) will never seamlessly coincide with reality. We can only notice, after the fact, that the state of things in question already existed, beforehand. The paradox is, of course, that this “beforehand,” this effect of “already there,” results retroactively from the symbolic determination itself. The excess, superfluous grain that makes a pile (superfluous, because the pile would remain a pile even if we removed the last grain we added) embodies the function of the signifier in reality. I am tempted to say that it represents the subject for all the other grains. This paradox of inevitable superfluousness, of necessary excessiveness, is a good illustration of the fundamental nature of the symbolic order. Language is always excessive, it is always added as a surplus – but if we take away this surplus, we lose the very thing that we had hoped to capture in its “naked form,” without the superfluous element: “reality in itself.”

This is a good point from which to approach the fundamental paradox of the Hegelian dialectical process, which is characterized by two traits that seem, at first, to contradict – perhaps even mutually exclude – each other. The principal thrust of Hegel's critique of the theory of “naive” knowledge – “common sense” – is that it sees the process of acquiring knowledge as a discovery, a penetration into a universe of pre-existing facts. We supposedly gain knowledge of reality as it existed prior to this process. This “naive” theory misses the constructive nature of the relationship of the process of knowledge in regard to its object, the way in which knowledge itself modifies the object, giving it, through the act of knowing, the form that it takes as an object of knowledge.

The key thrust of Hegel's critique bears on something completely different from the Kantian critique, which emphasized the constitutive role of transcendental subjectivity. For Kant, the subject gives universal form to a substantial content of transcendental origin (the “Thing-in-Itself”). Kant remained within the framework of the opposition between subject (the transcendental network of the possible forms of experience) and substance (the transcendental “Thing-in-Itself”), whereas for Hegel we must treat the substance itself as subject. Knowledge is not breaking through to the substantial content – content that would supposedly be unaffected by the knowing process – the act of subjective knowledge is already included in its substantial “object”; the path to the truth is part of the truth itself. In order to illustrate the point Hegel is making here, let me give an example that might initially seem surprising, but that testifies to the Hegelian legacy in historical materialism and that confirms Lacan's thesis that Marxism is not a “world view” (Lacan 1998b: 30). The fundamental claim of historical materialism is that the proletariat has a revolutionary role and a historical mission. But the proletariat only becomes an effective revolutionary subject through the recognition and acceptance of its true historical role. Historical materialism is not “objective knowledge of the historical role of the proletariat” – its knowledge requires the subjective position of the proletariat; it is in this sense self-referential, included in its own object of knowledge. Therefore, the first point we must address is the question of the “performative” character of the process of knowledge. When the subject goes behind the curtain of appearance to search for the hidden essence, he thinks he will discover something that was always there; he does not realize that in passing behind the curtain, he is bringing with him the very thing that he will find.

And yet, elsewhere in Hegel we can find an argument that seems initially to directly contradict this conception of the “performative” nature of the dialectical process. While the idea of “performativity” is today a commonplace in Hegelian interpretations, this other thesis receives significantly less attention from Hegelians. When Hegel describes the decisive reversal of the dialectical process, he constantly makes use of the same stylistic device: things are “already there,” or were “always already.” This implies the recognition of a pre-existing state of affairs. The reversal is reduced to the realization that “it's already like this” – we already have the thing we were looking for; what we aspire to is already the case. The passage from the scission to the dialectical synthesis is therefore in no way an ordinary “synthetization” of opposites – a productive act that reconciles the opposites, that erases the scission. Rather, it can be reduced to the realization that, in fact, the scission never existed, that it was an effect of our perspective. This in no way implies a position of abstract Identity that would nullify all differences, a night in which “all cows are black.” Rather, what Hegel emphasizes is that it is the scission itself that unites the opposing poles: the “synthesis” that we were looking for beyond the scission was already realized by the scission itself.

Take the example of the “unhappy consciousness” in the Phenomenology of the Spirit (Hegel 1977: 119). It is “unhappy” because it feels the pain of the scission between the Absolute and itself, (a) finite consciousness, excluded from the Absolute. What would it take to bridge this scission? How does the “unhappy consciousness” succeed in overcoming this scission? Not by succeeding, at long last, in arriving at the transcendent Absolute, finally satisfying its fervent aspirations by fusing itself with the Absolute. Instead, “overcoming” this scission requires only the simple recognition that the “unhappy consciousness” is already the medium, the field of mediation, the unity of the two opposing moments, because the two moments occur in it and not in the Absolute. In other words, the very fact that the “unhappy consciousness” suffers the pain of this scission proves that it is in itself the unity of the two opposing moments, of itself and the Absolute, which is not an Absolute that exists in serene indifference.

How then should we think of these two sides of the dialectical process? On the one hand, we have its “performative” character, which we must be careful not to treat as if it were the movement toward some pre-existing In-Itself. On the other, there is its “constative” character, according to which the scission is overcome because it never existed, the obstacle vanquished because it was never an obstacle. Herein lies the proof that the Hegelian dialectic is none other than the logic of the signifier. The concept of the signifier can be found in the paradoxical unity of these two traits, in the paradox of retroactive performativity. Let us return to our example of the pile of sand. The recognition that there is a pile is a performative one. The determination “pile” is not reducible to description using only positive properties. And, as we saw earlier, out of structural necessity, this recognition can only occur after the fact. It is always “at least one grain too late,” implying that what we have before us was already a pile “one grain earlier.” This is the signifier's performative “temporal reach,” which retroactively makes the thing in question (the pile, for example) what it already was.

The Witz of the synthesis

Is this kind of structure of retroactive performativity the key to the fundamental paradox of the dialectical process? Do we achieve the infinite goal by realizing that it was already achieved, erase the scission by recognizing that it was already erased, that, in a certain sense, it never even existed? Does the antithesis proceed to the synthesis through the realization that it was already, in itself, the synthesis it was searching for in vain outside of itself? Let us take as an example the following, quite Hegelian, Witz: Rabinovitch (a legendary figure in Jewish Witz from the Soviet Union) enters the Emigration Office in Moscow and declares that he wishes to emigrate. The bureaucrat on duty demands that he justify his request. Rabinovitch replies: “There are two reasons. The first is that I'm frightened that communist rule in the Soviet Union will collapse, and once the reactionaries are back in power, they will blame all the ills of socialism on the traditional scapegoats: the Jews. There will once again be pogroms. …” The bureaucrat interrupts him: “But that's absurd – communist rule in the Soviet Union is invincible, it will last forever, nothing will change the Soviet Union. …” “And that is the second reason,” Rabinovitch calmly replies.

What is essential to notice here is that the Witz only works because of its dialogic economy. If Rabinovitch simply listed the two reasons – (1) because, if Soviet power collapses, there will be pogroms; (2) because Soviet power will never collapse – we would only have a non-sequitur similar to the famous Freudian “kettle logic,” it would lack the twist necessary for it to be a Witz. The genius of this Witz lies in including the listener's reaction to Rabinovitch's first reason. There are two reasons: the first is offered, the other person protests, produces arguments against the first reason, and there you go, he himself has given the second reason. This is the logic of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis in its pure form. The thesis is the first argument (“I want to emigrate because I am afraid of the pogroms that would follow the collapse of Soviet power”), the bureaucrat's objection is the antithesis (“Soviet power is indestructible”), the synthesis is exactly the same as the antithesis – the bureaucrat's reply becomes its own opposite, it becomes the reason itself. The synthesis is the antithesis, the only step between the two is a reversal in perspective, a retroactive realization that the solution can be found in what we originally saw as the problem. The pass is what had initially seemed to be the impasse. The Hegelian performative makes it so that the thing in question is, in the end, what it had always-already been. A good example of this retroactive performativity can be found in Jean-Claude Milner's commentary on the Leninist-Maoist theory of the “weakest link” and the “principle contradiction”:

What was impossible for them is that an act could create the conditions that would, retroactively, make it just and timely. However, it has been shown that this is in fact what happens and it is not that we must try to see more clearly, but rather that we must blind ourselves sufficiently so as to be able to strike in just the right way, which is to say, in a way that would break things open. (Milner 1983: 16)

This idea – first we examine the state of affairs and determine the principle contradiction and the weakest link through “objective” analysis, and then, armed with our correct understanding, we strike at this very point – is an error of perspective. All acts, all interventions, are fundamentally shots in the dark. In a final analysis they are only grounded on themselves. It is through these acts, these interventions, that the point that was struck becomes “the weakest link.” Hegel, in his interpretation of tragedy, already emphasized this link between acting and blindness. This is why acting is fundamentally tragic and why it can only accomplish its true goal through its own failure, through missing its immediate aim.

The above error in perspective is not unrelated to the transfer; in fact it coincides with the retroactive illusion of supposition (“the subject who supposedly knows”) that is characteristic of the phenomenon of the transfer. For proof of this, we don't need to look any further than the retroactive character of love. When you fall in love, you necessarily fall prey to the illusion that, in a certain sense, you had always-already been in love. All of your life leading up until that point comes to seem like a chaos that was waiting for the creative gesture of love, a chaos that is only legible through the arrival of this love that would retroactively give it its signification, which is to say, that would help us detect the signs that foretold its arrival. Love is like the hero in one of the stories from The Arabian Nights who is wandering aimlessly through the desert, and, by pure happenstance, enters a cave. There, three wise men awaken from their deep slumber and greet him: “There you are! We've been waiting for you for more than three hundred years!” If you situate it within a linear sequence of events, the encounter with the loved one appears completely accidental, the result of pure happenstance. But afterwards, one gets the sense that it was, from the very beginning, destined to happen, and one cannot help feeling a little surprised, like in the old joke: “My mother was born in Brest, my father in Marseille and I was born in Paris – what a stroke of luck that we ever met!”

Hegel and the contingent

We can already begin to see how the paradox of retroactive performativity allows us to dispel the mirage of Hegelian “panlogicism,” of conceptual Necessity that governs the contingency of events. The habitual counterargument proffered against Hegel's alleged “panlogicism” is the irreducible fact of existence. As Schelling emphasized, logical necessity only deals with reality's conditions of possibility