Sex and the Failed Absolute

Slavoj Žižek

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350202412
• eBook ISBN: 9781350043794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism.

In forging this new materialism, Žižek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the Möbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, Žižek brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, and Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics, and culture.

Here is Žižek at his interrogative best.

Corollary 1

Intellectual Intuition and Intellectus Archetypus: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel

In German Idealism, the concept of subjectivity is torn between two extremes: subjectivity as the immediate unity of “intellectual intuition” (the free flow of direct self-awareness in which freedom and necessity, activity and passivity, coincide), and subjectivity as reflexivity (the power of distance, mediation, tearing apart). The first section of this chapter will trace the role that intellectual intuition plays throughout the German Idealist tradition, from Kant, who rejects it as inaccessible to us finite humans, through Fichte and Schelling, the latter of whom asserts it as “the highest organon of philosophy,” to Hegel, who overcomes this tension by way of asserting reflexivity itself as the absolute power. The second section will look more closely at this crucial difference between Kant and Hegel on the question of reflexivity; it will do so by focusing on Kant’s notion of intellectus archetypus and Hegel’s critique of Kant’s use of this notion.

Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel

Let’s begin with the concept of “intellectual intuition” (intellektuelle Anschauung), the free flow of direct self-awareness in which freedom and necessity, activity and passivity, collide. Intellectual intuition is impossible within the space of Kant’s thought because Kant’s notion of the transcendental I relies on a certain gap (from the Real) which is precisely closed in the experience of intellectual intuition. As he defines it in the Critique of Pure Reason, the transcendental subject is nothing but

the simple, and in itself completely empty, representation “I”; and we cannot even say that it is a concept, but only that it is a bare consciousness which accompanies all concepts. Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X. It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever, but can only revolve in a perpetual circle, since any judgment upon it has always already made use of its representation. And the reason why this inconvenience is inseparably bound up with it, is that consciousness in itself is not a representation distinguishing a particular object, but a form of representation in general, that is, of representation in so far as it is to be entitled knowledge; for it is only of knowledge that I can say that I am thereby thinking something.¹

We have to be very attentive in reading these lines. What Kant is saying here is that a radical gap is constitutive of the I, a gap that separates the I (transcendental subject) from its noumenal support (“this I or he or it … which thinks”): “this inconvenience is inseparably bound up with it,” since the I exists only as ex-sisting, at a distance from the “thing” that it is. Or, in terms of cognition, whereas we can know objects in reality phenomenally (despite the fact that their In-itself remains inaccessible to us), our Self is unknowable to us phenomenally because (on account of its self-identity, its identity with “myself”) knowing it even phenomenally would equal knowing it noumenally. And here things get really complex: this gap that constitutively separates the I from its noumenal support also determines the very status of the I as practico-ethical. If intellectual intuition were to be possible, the innermost act of the I would be contemplative: achieving the ultimate identity of subject and object, of thinking and being.

Kant is here opposed to Spinoza; his thesis is that the Spinozan position of knowledge without the “deontological” dimension of an unconditional Ought is impossible to sustain: there is an irreducible crack in the edifice of Being, and it is through this crack that the deontological dimension of Ought intervenes—the Ought fills in the incompleteness of Is, of Being. When Kant says that he reduced the domain of knowledge in order to make space for religious faith, he is to be taken quite literally, in a radically anti-Spinozist way: from the Kantian perspective, Spinoza’s position appears as a nightmarish vision of subjects reduced to marionettes. What, exactly, does a marionette stand for as a subjective stance? In Kant, we find the term “marionette” in a mysterious subchapter of his Critique of Practical Reason entitled “Of the Wise Adaptation of Man’s Cognitive Faculties to His Practical Vocation,” in which he endeavors to answer the question of what would happen to us if we were to gain access to the noumenal domain, to the Ding an sich:

Instead of the conflict which now the moral disposition has to wage with inclinations and in which, after some defeats, moral strength of mind may be gradually won, God and eternity in their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes … Thus most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, few would be done from hope, none from duty. The moral worth of actions, on which alone the worth of the person and even of the world depends in the eyes of supreme wisdom, would not exist at all. The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures.²

So, for Kant, direct access to the noumenal domain would deprive us of the very “spontaneity” which forms the kernel of transcendental freedom: it would turn us into lifeless automata, or, to put it in today’s terms, into “thinking machines.” The implication of this passage is much more radical and paradoxical than may appear. If we discard its inconsistency (how could fear and lifeless gesticulation coexist?), the conclusion it imposes is that, at the level of phenomena as well as noumena, we humans are a “mere mechanism” with no autonomy and freedom: as phenomena, we are not free, we are a part of nature, a “mere mechanism” totally submitted to causal links, a part of the nexus of causes and effects, and as noumena, we are again not free but reduced to a “mere mechanism.” (Is what Kant describes as a person who directly knows the noumenal domain not strictly homologous to the utilitarian subject whose acts are fully determined by the calculus of pleasures and pains?) Our freedom persists only in a space IN BETWEEN the phenomenal and the noumenal. It is therefore not that Kant simply limited causality to the phenomenal domain in order to be able to assert that, at the noumenal level, we are free autonomous agents; Kant’s point is that we are only free insofar as our horizon is that of the phenomenal, insofar as the noumenal domain remains inaccessible to us. What we encounter here is again the tension between the two notions of the Real, the Real of the inaccessible noumenal Thing and the Real as the pure gap, the interstice between the repetition of the same: the Kantian Real is the noumenal Thing beyond phenomena, while the Hegelian Real is the gap itself between the phenomenal and the noumenal, the gap which sustains freedom.³

Is the way out of this predicament to assert that we are free insofar as we are noumenally autonomous, but our cognitive perspective remains constrained to the phenomenal level? In this case, we are “really free” at the noumenal level, but our freedom would be meaningless if we were also to have cognitive insight into the noumenal domain, since that insight would always determine our choices. (Who would choose evil when confronted with the fact that the price of doing evil will be the divine punishment?) However, does this imagined case not provide us with the only consequent answer to the question “what would a truly free act be,” a free act for a noumenal entity, an act of true noumenal freedom? It would be to know all the inexorable horrible consequences of choosing the evil and nonetheless to choose it. This would have been a truly “non-pathological” act, an act of acting with no regard for one’s pathological interests.

The basic gesture of Kant’s transcendental turn is thus to invert the obstacle into a positive condition. In the standard Leibnizean ontology, we finite subjects can act freely in spite of our finitude, since freedom is the spark which unites us with the infinite god. In Kant, conversely, this finitude, our separation from the Absolute, is the positive condition of our freedom. In short, the condition of impossibility is the condition of possibility. In this sense, Susan Neiman is right to remark that “the worry that fueled debates about the difference between appearance and reality was not the fear that the world might not turn out to be the way it seems to us—but rather the fear that it would.”⁴ This fear is ultimately ethical: the closure of the gap between appearance and reality would deprive us of our freedom and thus of our ethical dignity. What this means is that the gap between noumenal reality and appearance is redoubled: one has to distinguish between noumenal reality “in itself” and the way noumenal reality appears within the domain of appearance (say, in our experience of freedom and the moral Law). This tiny edge distinguishing the two is the edge between the sublime and the horrible: god is sublime for us from our finite perspective, but experienced in itself, god would turn into a mortifying horror.⁵ The Kantian transcendental is irreducibly rooted in the empirical/temporal/finite—it is the trans-phenomenal as it appears within the finite horizon of temporality. And this dimension of the transcendental (specifically as opposed to the noumenal) is precisely what is absent in Spinoza, the philosopher of infinite immanence.

Consequently, do we not find the distinctio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Text
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The Unorientable Space of Dialectical Materialism
• Theorem I: The Parallax of Ontology
• Corollary 1: Intellectual Intuition and Intellectus Archetypus: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel
• Scholium 1.1: Buddha, Kant, Husserl
• Scholium 1.2: Hegel’s Parallax
• Scholium 1.3: The “Death of Truth”
• Theorem II: Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute
• Corollary 2: Sinuosities of Sexualized Time
• Scholium 2.1: Schematism in Kant, Hegel … and Sex
• Scholium 2.2: Marx, Brecht, and Sexual Contracts
• Scholium 2.3: The Hegelian Repetition
• Scholium 2.4: Seven Deadly Sins
• Theorem III: The Three Unorientables
• Corollary 3: The Retarded God of Quantum Ontology
• Scholium 3.1: The Ethical Möbius Strip
• Scholium 3.2: The Dark Tower of Suture
• Scholium 3.3: Suture and Hegemony
• Scholium 3.4: The World with(out) a Snout
• Scholium 3.5: Towards a Quantum Platonism
• Theorem IV: The Persistence of Abstraction
• Corollary 4: Ibi Rhodus Ibi Saltus!
• Scholium 4.1: Language, Lalangue
• Scholium 4.2: Prokofiev’s Travels
• Scholium 4.3: Beckett as the Writer of Abstraction
• Index
• Copyright