The Most Sublime Hysteric

Hegel with Lacan

Slavoj Zizek

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780745663753
  9780745663746
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745681443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

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.

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 mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Introduction: Impossible Absolute Knowledge
• Book I: Hegel with Lacan
• Book II: Post-Hegelian Impasses
• References
• Index