Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

1.1 A (Transcendental) Materialism of the Psychoanalytical Subject

Žižek's return to German Idealism is an investigation of the obscure origins of the Lacanian subject. Žižek is attracted not only to Lacanian psychoanalysis' thematization of the non-coincident “gap” in the Symbolic and its consequences for politics, but also to the conflictual relationship between mind and body that it places at the foundation of psychogenesis. If symbolic structures of language display a radical autonomy from bodily forces and can construct their own world, the essence of human being must be constituted originally by a kind of biological “short circuit” that disrupts man's complete immersion in nature, eternally separating the Innenwelt and Aussenwelt (inner world and outer world), thereby making it so they can never coincide: that is, by a mal-adaptation that “represents the minimum of freedom, of a behaviour uncoupled from the utilitarian-survivalist attitude” insofar as “the organism is no longer fully determined by its environs, that it 'explodes/implodes' into a cycle of autonomous behaviour.” [4] If, as conventionally defined in Freudian psychoanalysis, psychosis or madness is taken to be a withdrawal from the objective world into an inner, self-enclosed space (a loss of reality), [5] then in Lacanian psychoanalysis psychosis or madness is paradoxically not a mere accidental state seen in certain “sick” individuals, but is the irreducible ontological background of all human existence. More disconcertingly, this is understood by Lacan not only to be the condition of possibility of human experience as such, but also that of freedom, so that the philosophical significance of the two is ultimately identified as dialectically interrelated aspects of the same phenomenon:

For Lacan, the primary question in psychoanalysis is not how various forms of madness arise as a deviation from normal mental health, but how this more originary, irruptive state of nature as that within which freedom and madness magically emerge in a single brushstroke can be regulated so that what we regard as sanity and normality can themselves take hold. If madness is “freedom's most faithful companion” it is precisely because madness in its most primordial sense refers to the specific ontogenetic conditions for the irreducibility of language that makes us distinctly human: that is to say, to the state of affairs by means of which language can solipsistically relate to itself as a self-enclosed differential system of signification “with no an external support.” [7] Just as in clinical cases of psychosis or madness, here too the subject has “lost touch” with reality, although reality must be understood in its natural (animalistic) rather than its sociopolitical (human) meaning. It is “the price the Lacanian subject pays for its 'transubstantiation' from being the agent of a direct animal vitality to being a speaking subject whose identity is kept apart from the direct vitality of passions,” [8] that which guarantees that the subject is dominated by “non-natural” influences or which is, strictly speaking, at its zero-level abiological (wherein lies its freedom). This has two principal effects. First, because Lacan's self-given task is to formulate the autonomous structures that constitute human subjectivity in opposition to naturalist theories of psychiatry, his philosophy has the formal appearance of a retour to the modern transcendentalism of the cogito. The Lacanian subject is consequently haunted by similar problems as those of the Cartesian subject, both in terms of epistemology (since the relationship to the extra-conscious alterity of the world is problematized, how can we justify the propositions of science?) and the mind-body relation (what exactly is the relationship between symbolic thinking and natural processes?). Second, due to the internal constraints of his project, Lacan left unanswered how reality in itself could incite the generation of these quasi-transcendental structures that make up the universe of human meaning in its psychotic self-enclosure, with the concomitant problem of how we relate to this X that simultaneously precedes our emergence into language and forms its obscure ontologico-foundational basis. Seeing a structural identity with the immediate reactions to Kant, Žižek sees the possibility of confronting the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis with those of German Idealism.

Žižek's metaphysics originates in his attempt to delve into the material origins preceding the psychoanalytical subject by focusing on this moment of immanent rupture in being—which he links to the Todestrieb—as that which, by opening up a space separating us from nature in the latter, appears simultaneously to be linked to our freedom, that is, to our madness. Refusing to buy into the claim that all is ultimately reducible to the ebb and flow of matter, he sees his own endeavour as “the necessary step in the rehabilitation of the philosophy of dialectical materialism.” [9] Yet this designation is inherently problematic, given what we have just seen: not only does it try to make Žižek's own form of materialism approach that of Marx and Engels without drawing the necessary distinctions between them, it more importantly fails to articulate the essentially paradoxical and innovative manner in which Žižek rearticulates the materialism-idealism debate and therefore risks obscuring his own originality. Consequently, I endorse Adrian Johnston's characterization of Žižek's theory of the subject as a form of transcendental materialism [10] for four reasons, but differ in my own understanding in one important way that in turn distinguishes my own project from his.

First, it has the benefit of allowing the reader to have a direct intuition of what is truly at stake in Žižek's parallax ontology and its metaphysical implications. Whereas dialectical materialism traditionally views the mind-body relationship as grounded within the dynamic interpenetration of the two as a complex self-unfolding identity within difference, transcendental materialism, by focusing on the ontogenetic conditions of the possibility of the transcendental subject, conventionally understood as in opposition to natural conditions, already suggests the immanent emergence of an irruptive negativity within being, an irreducible transcendence that paradoxically shatters the former's pure immanence from within.

Second, a point not mentioned by Johnston, Fichte uses the expression in his 1794 Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar's Vocation to draw attention to the impossibility of explaining the (onto)genesis of the subject: “[i]t is certainly not true that the pure I is a product of the not-I [...]. The assertion that the pure I is a product of the not-I expresses a transcendental materialism which is completely contrary to reason.” [11] Fichte's argument is simple: one cannot explain the material conditions of transcendental freedom insofar as that would equate two logically distinct fields irreconcilable with one another—namely, that of unbridled self-determination (the realm of acting) and that of dead contingency (the realm of being), thus causing us to lose sight of the radicality of human autonomy. Writing in a similar vein, Žižek attempts to show not only how we can, but more primordially why we must develop a metaphysical account of reality that, instead of jeopardizing the (practical) primacy of idealism, would actually found it by inscribing this very dualism of I and not-I into the fold of being as that which makes the absolute divided within itself and whose non-coincidence to self thereby opens up the birthplace for human freedom. Transcendental idealism is—or better, must be said to always already spectrally refer to—transcendental materialism, the difference between them being only that of a parallax shift: the two are negatively linked to one another by an impossible in-between, a disjunctive “and,” the very name of which is for Žižek the subject, so that an idealism must convert itself into a materialism and vice versa if subjectivity is to be fully explained.

It is precisely at this conceptual conjuncture of the role of a disjunctive “and” that my own understanding of Žižek's transcendental materialism distinguishes itself from that of Johnston. Although Johnston is right to claim that Žižek's own descriptions of the birth of subjectivity have a propensity to focus on its process as a self-instituting fiat “analogous to the cutting of the Gordian knot” (which in a certain sense obfuscates his project insofar as one of its major questions is how the closed circuit of drives in the Real could result in the transcendence of subjectivity), [12] Johnston in my view has a tendency to downplay the intrinsically paradoxical nature of all such inquiry into the obscure origins of the psychoanalytico-Cartesian subject in Žižek's work in two ways. On the one hand, he emphasizes that the subject is rendered possible by a short-circuiting of its libidinal-material ground. But if an emergent breakdown in nature's inner being does give rise to the ontogenetic possibility of the subject, it in no way gives birth to the latter: nature's auto-laceration may be necessary for the self-positing freedom of transcendental subjectivity, but it is not sufficient, for there is no possible transition from nature to subjectivity, a point that—though also raised by Johnston—I believe must be radicalized. This is why on my reading the reference to Fichte is so important, for if Žižek's metaphysics is an attempt to show how a transcendental materialism can be developed, it nevertheless refuses to give up on the fundamental claim made by Fichte that the upsurge of the pure I in being is executed “by absolute freedom, not through a transition, but by means of a leap.” [13] As a result, we can also understand why Žižek displays hesitation concerning Johnston's and Malabou's shared project of merging philosophy and neuroscience—because there is ultimately no emergence of subjectivity possible within his parallax ontology. [14] On the other hand, because Johnston attaches less importance than I do to the rupturing free leap into subjectivity, he is simultaneously silent concerning the necessarily mytho-poetic element of Žižek's transcendental materialism, which for me thus becomes central for understanding the nuance of his specific overcoming of radical idealism. This has two important consequences, one methodological and the other metaphysical. Methodologically, if the leap into subjectivity is an ontological passage through madness, [15] then there is an upper limit to the power of thought to explain its own emergence in being. What we need is a capacity for fabulative mythologizing, for “the need for the form of mythical narrative arises when one endeavours to break the circle of the symbolic order and to give an account of its genesis ('origins') from the Real and its pre-symbolic antagonism.” [16] Metaphysically, if subjectivity is the psychotic night of the world, then any investigation into its underlying ontology simultaneously requires a metaphysical archaeology of madness, that is, a theorizing of what the ultimate structure of reality must be like so that the subject's emergence could occur. In this manner, if Johnston is perhaps more interested in the paradoxical basis of transcendental subjectivity in nature, I am more interested in what occurs methodologically and metaphysically once we inscribe radical idealism as a form of madness into being, in such a way that two similar yet different views of Žižek's system emerge.

Third, to return to the benefits of the characterization “transcendental materialism,” I endorse it because it draws our attention to Žižek's philosophical relevance outside of the fields of cultural studies, radical politics, and film theory by placing his thinking in direct contact with a series of other contemporary thinkers rethinking metaphysics, whether it be by representatives of the analytic tradition, object-oriented philosophy, new French materialism, or various other forms of the new speculative turn. Two thinkers deserve to be mentioned here by name, since they offer a transcendental materialism radically different from that of Žižek: Iain Hamilton Grant and Rainer E. Zimmerman. Although Grant would have reservations about his thinking being referred to as a “transcendental” materialism, his Philosophies of Nature after Schelling [17] offers an alternative account of the materialism-idealism relationship and the immanent emergence of the transcendental subject within nature that challenges not only Žižek's reading of Schelling, but more strongly his entire metaphysics. Zimmerman, a prolific German philosopher little known in the English-speaking world, was in fact the first person to use the concept of “transcendental materialism” in a contemporary context in his 1998 book Die Rekonstruktion von Raum, Zeit und Materie (The Reconstruction of Space, Time and Matter) [18] and then fully develop it in his massive 2004 System des transzendentalen Materialismus (System of Transcendental Materialism). [19] Zimmerman, like Grant, departs largely from Schelling, but also from Spinoza and Bloch, and offers an understanding of transcendental materialism in dialogue with contemporary science, especially physics, in stark opposition to the one presented here. For both, the thinking subject does not implicate an ontological trembling or pure difference within the field of being, and their respective accounts of the mind-body relationship can in no means be equated with what Žižek would perhaps be tempted to call a return to pre-modern cosmology. Moreover, considering how Žižek's own philosophy, similar in spirit to that of Zimmerman, does not possess mere implications or consequences for how we conduct empirical science, but directly engages with a broad range of disciplines such as quantum mechanics [20] and cognitive science, [21] by calling Žižek's philosophy a transcendental materialism I further hope to accomplish two things: to emphasize the systematic reach of Žižek's thinking and the exigence that metaphysics must also be an interlocutor with science.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that in Less Than Nothing Žižek also endorses Adrian Johnston's coinage of “transcendental materialism” in two passages in the last chapter on quantum mechanics, but with an important qualification that renders explicit for the first time a crucial metaphysical element of his own brand of materialism and its nuanced character. In the first instance, he claims that the key insight gained by contemporary physics is that material reality in itself does not present us with a dense field of fully constituted realities that form the ultimate building blocks of the universe, but rather with irreducibly indeterminate states lacking any substantial being and from which “hard” reality can only emerge if there is a collapse of the wave function. [22] In this sense, the micro-universe of quantum particles is strangely “less” than that of the macro-universe that constructs itself from its vicissitudes, in a way that is remarkably similar to how the Kantian subject can only construct a unified, coherent world of appearances from the inconsistent fragments of sensation. In a strange logical short circuit, it would appear that not only is there no bottom-up causality at the level of experience (transcendental constitution is more real than what Kant calls “a rhapsody of perception” [23] ), but even the most fundamental level of the universe is metaphysically more chaotic than the ordered macro-level physical world that science classically described. It is as if all reality is transcendentally constitutive, so that the only way to break free of the correlationist circle is to push “this transcendental correlation into the Thing itself:” “[i]t is against this background that one can make out the contours of what can perhaps only be designated by the oxymoron 'transcendental materialism' (proposed by Adrian Johnston).” [24] The second instance adds some clarification to the metaphysical implications of this idea by stating that the “the only true consistent 'transcendental materialism' which is possible after the Kantian transcendental idealism” is one that risks the following difficult wager: “[w]hat if we posit that 'Things-in-themselves' emerge against the background of the Void of Nothingness, the way this Void is conceived in quantum physics, as not just a negative void, but the portent of all possible reality?” [25] Although Žižek here takes transcendental materialism in a different direction than Johnston by introducing it to make a metaphysical point concerning the absolute rather than a more broadly ontological one concerning the subject, part of my project in what follows will be to show that his metaphysics of the void is not only completely compatible with his older ontology of the subject, but can be seen as its organic elaboration.

If Žižek's approach differs significantly from that of Grant or Zimmerman, it is because his game is different, even though this leads him to cover much of the same thematic domains—and hence it is interesting to label all three as “transcendental materialists” for the same reasons as it is to refer to Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling as “German Idealists” insofar as subsuming such irreconcilably different thinkers under a single category reveals a dynamic, pulsating movement, a battleground of theoretical positions around a shared set of problems rather than a shared doctrine, and thus something living. What so strongly distinguishes Žižek's form of transcendental materialism from others is that, finding a fundamental structural identity between Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-Kantian idealism, he tries to illustrate the uncanny identity that exists between the psychoanalytical subject haunted by the Todestrieb as its constitutive basis and the unconscious, disavowed Grundlogik of German Idealism, with the conviction that a psychoanalytical dialogue between the two could open up a radically new possibility for metaphysics. By falling upon premonitions of the psychoanalytical experience in concepts such as Kantian unruliness, the Hegelian “night of the world,” and the Schellingian notion of the Grund, Žižek psychoanalytically reinterprets the late German Idealist attempts to give a metaphysical vision of reality compatible with ontological emergence of the pure I in order to make us not only rethink what is at stake in the tradition of modern philosophy, a truth repressed and haunting its very history, but more primordially what is revealed with the advent of subjectivity as such: the notion of ontological catastrophe, the auto-disruption of reality into a painful not-all, at the origin of experience, with all the metaphysical implications that entails for our understanding of world in itself. Although Žižek's interpretations are heterodox, he believes that he is justified in singling out and radicalizing these premonitions, which often only appear in textual margins and often officially lack the theoretical primacy that Žižek bestows upon them, by means of the methodological application of various psychoanalytical techniques to the texts of German Idealism, these enabling him to plunge into and reveal the non-coincidences internally plaguing their symbolic space and thus retroactively restructuring their surface appearance in a manner similar to the analyst-analysand relation in therapy. We must traverse the fantasy of tradition if we are to arrive at its truth—this is Žižek's provocative claim and one that we will explore throughout most of this book. Thus, if we are to gain a preliminary sense of the driving forces of Žižek's reactualization of German Idealism and the systematicity of its method in spite of its apparent self-serving selectiveness, we must briefly pass through the Lacanian subject.

1.2 The Lacanian Subject and the Irreducible Ambiguity of the Real

As the fundamental presupposition of Žižek's philosophy, the Lacanian subject is to be radically distinguished from the philosophical subject of modernity. Although the former exhibits many traits that link it to early transcendental philosophy (it grounds the symbolic structures that constitute phenomenal reality through a free idealization) it is in direct opposition to the self-conscious transparency of the Cartesian cogito, the self-legislation of the Kantian rational agent, or the Hegelian account of free personality. For Lacan, the freedom of the I as witnessed in phenomenological self-experience is an illusion: completely determined by cultural and linguistic influences, the ego is an object and is constantly trying to construct a fantasmatic narcissistic space within which it can (falsely) perceive itself as a centre of self-effectuating action. Although this does not prevent the existence of human freedom for either Lacan or Žižek, it means that freedom itself gets largely displaced from consciousness into the unconscious, in a move formally similar to the middle-late Schelling of the Freiheitsschrift and Weltalter, but with an important twist. The subject is not an energetic, productive will that precedes the constitution of phenomenal reality, but is in one of its most important modalities nothing but an impersonal abyss that, uncannily, renders possible a minimal consistency of self. In this sense, the self is infinitely split at its core: when one looks inside oneself one not only finds an “extimacy,” material coming from elsewhere, where one should find one's innermost core, but if one looks long enough one only finds a void staring back. The Lacanian-Žižekian subject has no intrinsic content because it is pure form: the entire “plenitude” of cultural and psychological experience only emerges as a kind of defence formation against this primordial nothingness of the subject as an attempt to fill in its constitutive “gap” with false positive substantiality. But because this “gap” can never be filled in, it is ultimately repressed due to its traumatic, personality-shattering quality, so that we find traces of its disavowed knowledge in the slips and slides of speech, symbolic inconsistencies and non-coincidences in writing, the images of fantasies and dreams, and other phenomena. This creates two levels to any given (personal, ethical, political, or even philosophical) discourse: its surface movement, grounded in the narcissistic, self-deceiving orbit of the ego, and its “latent,” underlying truth, which shows itself negatively within the holes and inconsistencies of the former and can only be brought forth après-coup. In therapy, the task of the analyst is to make the analysand encounter and appropriate the second, the Real that afflicts the analysand often to a degree of painful agony, thereby forcing them to realign the symbolic structures underlying their personality so that the latter are more in tune with that which they reject, given that this (unconscious) act of recoil and exclusion has begun to obstruct their life. After all, the repressed always returns.

To explain this complex, Lacanian psychoanalysis categorizes experience in terms of the three registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. All three exist in dialectical simultaneity, so that they all depend upon and interpenetrate one another. Lacan uses a Borromean knot to illustrate this level of mutual co-existence, the point of which is to preclude the possibility of arguing for the primacy of one register over the other, as it is unclear if either can have logical priority insofar as the cutting off or isolating of one destroys the whole. The Imaginary is roughly equivalent to phenomenological experience and perception but is also related to the cogito and its “narcissistic” fantasy of existential self-mastery. It is identified with a necessary moment of misrecognition and irremovable untruth in one's everyday being and knowledge of self, world, and others, for it projects completion where there is lack. The Symbolic constitutes the logical fabric of language and the laws of culture that transcend and are anterior to the concretely existing personal subject. It therefore precedes the imaginary orbit of experience insofar as the individual phenomenological constitution of objects in a strong sense presupposes language. As a self-enclosed structural system capable of reproducing and propagating itself, the Symbolic displays an irreducible autonomy that displaces the role of nature in understanding human psychology and cultural phenomena because it is able to articulate itself in utter isolation from it: the “incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier,” [26] the solipsistic dance of language always in step with itself, means that the essential link between signifier and transcendent, extra-linguistic signified has been violently ruptured and that the mere chains of signifiers relating to themselves are capable of producing/constructing meaning by themselves in an ontological void. In its simplest form, the Real is that which does not fall under either the Imaginary or the Symbolic, whereby its upsurge is associated with experiences of breakdown and inconsistency not only of the transcendental unity at the basis of phenomenological experience, but even of language or culture itself. Lacan and Žižek therefore use a plethora of adjectives to describe it, which attempt to capture this element of irrevocable logical and existential rupture: “traumatic,” “monstrous,” “horrifying,” and “impossible,” to name a few.

Yet there is an irreducible ambiguity in Lacan's definition of the Real, which serves as the starting point for Žižek's own philosophical endeavour, for it is precisely in trying to resolve this ambiguity that his metaphysical project gets off the ground. The Real elicits two potentially incompatible interpretative possibilities, and we often see Lacan oscillating back and forth between them. In its first guise, the Real is the excluded Other of the Imaginary and Symbolic, which only truly “comes to be” when the subject constitutes itself. In this sense, the Real is not only dependent upon the symbolic matrix of language and the orbit of phenomenological experience but also only shows itself negatively through their immanent obstruction. This Real-as-lack is distinctly Hegelian: it corresponds to concepts such as “tarrying with the negative” and the suffering that consciousness undergoes when it runs up against non-coincidence, paradox, and limitation in social and political action or scientific thought about the world. It has absolutely no positive content in itself even though, as an internal limit within a given symbolic space, it may effectuate an overhauling of the latter's structure and possibilities as the subject attempts to overcome its deadlock so that it is potentially productive in its very trauma. In its second guise, we could also understand the Real as the pre-subjective life of pure jouissance from which the human infant exiles itself by becoming a linguistic subject, yet upon which the Imaginary and the Symbolic logically depend, even if they only relate to it negatively through its primordial foreclosure from experience and language as the founding gesture of subjectivity itself. Bruce Fink refers to this as the Real₁ because it is the necessary posit of the Symbolic despite the fact that it is inaccessible from within the latter, whose ciphering activity doesn't merely “reconstitute” objective reality by meditating it like a camera obscura. Given that this pre-subjective Real must be said to be without lack (only with language can we speak of absence and presence), [27] the idealizing process of human meaning makes it impossible to reach. As something that overreaches the idealizing, linguistic activity of the subject, in this modality the Real, corresponding to the Schellingian concept of the indivisible remainder (der nie aufgehende Rest), that pre-experiential darkness that can never be brought into light of consciousness yet upon which all consciousness rests, is the Real-as-excess. But such a free ciphering activity simultaneously creates the condition of the possibility of its own breakdown insofar as it will not always be capable of idealizing the Real in a way that enables its own autonomous, smooth functioning. [28] These “kinks” in the Symbolic correspond with the Real-as-lack or Real₂, something that cannot be integrated because it presents itself as intrinsically and paradoxically non-relational, as an inassimilable kernel within the self-referential matrix of the symbolic relations within which it emerged. The problem is as follows: Is the Real₁ a necessary, illusory construct of the Symbolic designed to give a fantasmatically fabricated sense of “positivity” to a world that exists beyond its grasp (rendering it a mere secondary effect of a solipsistically self-contained structuralist metapsychology)? Or is it, more primordially, the pre-subjective, ontological basis of the Symbolic, to which we have access despite the apparent impossibility of reaching the pure Real through the differential system of language (thus showing the obscure origins of the Real₂ in an ontology)? If the second is possible, what does this mean in terms of Lacan's declaration of the logical equivalence and interpenetration of the registers?

1.3 From Logcio-Dialectical Simultaneity to the Ontogenesis of the Subject

Even if all three registers exist in a logico-dialectical simultaneity, within the development of Lacanian psychoanalysis we see a gradual shift in emphasis in the thematization of the registers largely due to internal reasons. Lacan's early work is largely an attempt to come to terms with the mirror stage and its implications for understanding psychogenesis. In the mirror stage, which happens around the age of six months, there is a recognition of an immanent blockage in nature that tears apart the organic unity of the body. The human infant lacks motor coordination—its self-experience is infinitely fragmented and lacking in any internal unity. Lacan's provocative thesis is that the only way out of this biological short circuit is a vel, a misrecognition of the primordial helplessness of the human organism in the “specular image” [29] of its mirror self in which the child finds a mesmerizing and captivating lie of false mastery into which it libidinally invests itself. Already at this early stage we see why Lacan is so critical of the modern conception of subjectivity and rationality. The result of the mirror stage is a reorganization of the fragmented being of the child through a virtual and therefore illusionary schema as the self becomes alienated from its real chaotic being. Yet Lacan comes to see that the imaginary beginnings of psychogenesis are themselves necessarily grounded in the Symbolic: the only reason why the child becomes tantalized by his image is because their parents provoke the response. “Look, it's you!” In this sense, the entire genesis of the self is preceded by a carving out of a space for the child within the symbolic universe of familial relations even before the child was born. After this “linguistic turn,” Lacan turns all of his attention to the nature of the Symbolic and seems, in many respects, largely to leave the Imaginary behind.

Inspired by the work of Levi-Strauss, who argued that “[s]tructural linguistics will certainly play the same renovating role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has played for the physical sciences,” [30] Lacan then begins to apply the methodology of Saussure's structuralism to psychoanalysis, accomplishing this feat largely by a retour to Freud. What Lacan finds so intriguing is that, despite all of Freud's attempts to ground the unconscious within a natural vitalism of the body or biological movement of instincts, his texts themselves orbit around the analyses of images and language. Lacan's fundamental thesis is that, retroactively, we can see that Freud already had an implicit idea of the importance of linguistics for understanding the unconscious but was unable fully to articulate this fundamental insight because he lacked the appropriate methodology. This in turn creates a fundamental and irremovable non-coincidence within Freud's texts as they oscillate between purely structural analyses of language and obscure vitalistic biologism. Consequently, Lacan argues that if we read Freud against Freud, structural linguistics can give psychoanalysis the scientific rigor that it needs by systematizing the logic of the unconscious, which is the origin of Lacan's famous saying “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Linked to this linguistic turn are his critiques of ego-psychology as an attempt to strengthen the ego and post-Freudian attempts to biologize the unconscious. For Lacan, the unconscious is, strictly speaking, an irreducibly linguistic phenomenon: it only emerges after or alongside the advent of language, in the split between the subject of enunciation and the enunciating subject. It has nothing to do with deep-lying personality structures determining how the ego relates to the external world or instinctual energetics.

Although this suggests an obvious superseding of the Imaginary by the Symbolic, commentators such as Richard Boothby and Alexander Leupin warn against this, arguing that Lacan is much more complex and subtle than he may initially appear. Lacan never backs away from the claim that all registers mutually depend upon one another in order to have any efficacy at all. Even if the self-generating matrix of language and culture historically precedes and conditions the possibility of any concretely existing person, its differential network of meaning is only possible through an originary phenomenological perception of signifiers. [31] The colonization of the body by the transcendentally alienating structures of the Symbolic requires the activity of the Imaginary so that the various phonetic differences that allow signs to be intelligible in contradistinction from one another can be established in the first place. Moreover, the late Lacan's topological formalizations of the psyche, as already mentioned, proclaim a strict equivalency between them, so that “the symbolic order's supremacy appears as an aporia, an ethical decision that logic does not support.” [32] But how can Žižek then, as a Lacanian philosopher of the Real, justify his own theoretical preference for it over the other registers where Lacan's texts seem to contradict such an approach?

Although Žižek's work holds an uncertain relation to Lacanian orthodoxy, it would be wrong to claim that this troublesome problematic is just a direct consequence of Žižek's own reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis. By the very act of embarking on a metaphysics of the Real Žižek does seem to imply that we must find a way to overstep Lacan's attempt to conserve the equivalency of the registers if psychoanalysis is to find a sufficient theoretical grounding, even if doing so means that we risk making the entire psychoanalytical edifice he constructed collapse. But Žižek's own thinking is not as radical a rupture with Lacan as it may appear, for the late Lacan too ruminates about the understanding of nature necessarily implied by his theory and therefore himself gestures towards the possibility of a metaphysics of the Real consistent with it. [33] Even as early as the seventeenth seminar, we can find Lacan proclaiming that one of the logical implications of the psychoanalytical experience is that substance is not-all (that is, nature does not present us with a spherical totality— un tout, une sphère). [34] Yet if the Real is only lack, and the essential link between signifier and transcendent, extra-linguistic signified has been cut, how can Lacan even legitimately make such statements? How can he philosophically justify such a “direct touching” of the Real given the epistemological solipsism intrinsic to the cybernetic ciphering of the Symbolic? Žižek’s wager is that one can develop a metaphysics of the Real that not only does not jeopardize the equivalency of the registers, but even explains their emergence, thereby implying that to grasp the essence of psychoanalysis and draw out its philosophical implications we need to do two things: (i) metapsychologically explicate the ontogenesis of the subject in terms of a materialism compatible with the founding insights of a radical idealism or, in other words, explain the relation of the Real₁ of the apparent excess of the ontological to the linguistic to the Real₂ of symbolic or notional lack, since this is the great question left unanswered by Lacan and upon which his entire theoretical apparatus ultimately depends; (ii) instead of focusing on Lacan's relationship to nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychology, French structuralism, the Prague school of linguistics, or existentialism, we should return to German Idealism, since it is only in a direct dialogue with this tradition that we can find a way out of the impasses of Lacanian psychoanalysis. But to develop such a metaphysics, we must leave psychoanalysis and venture into German Idealism.

2.1 The Methodology of a Psychoanalytical Dialogue: Or, Lacan with Hegel and Hegel with Lacan

What is amazing about this psychoanalytical dialogue, however, is the heterodox readings of German Idealism and Lacanian psychoanalysis it produces. To many critics, Žižek simply shows no concern for textual faithfulness or the history of ideas in his readings of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Lacan. His methodological approach appears, if anything, to function through a deliberate misunderstanding or liberal reconstruction that purposefully overlooks key conceptual distinctions that challenge his own philosophical outlook. Although there is some superficial truth in these critiques—one must admit that Žižek focuses on often marginal selections from texts and raises them to a level of logical priority that they do not have in the original—one of Žižek's rare comments on his own methodology is very helpful for dispelling confusion on how he proceeds:

Even if Žižek describes his own philosophy as an act of textual violence, almost of rape (it is also worth mentioning that the word “bugger” originates the old French bougre, meaning heretic, and acquires its colloquial sense from heresy being associated with deviate, outlawed sexual practices), this quote reveals a hidden methodological presupposition that guides all of Žižek's interpretative work. The comparison of his own philosophy to that of Deleuze is of crucial importance and is not to be downplayed. It demonstrates that, even if Žižek is intentionally going against surface textual movements in his reading, he does not understand his own philosophy as in any sense arbitrary, a deliberate misunderstanding of the philosophers with whom he is engaging, or even as exhibiting any disregard for the tradition. Žižek recognizes that he is not doing traditional history of philosophy or any kind of philologico-exegetical interpretation, but is, instead, attempting to do something that is productive of new concepts by revealing their disavowed insights. But this generative activity of concept-creation can bring forth something unexpected, unsettling, even traumatic—we may produce monsters.

Žižek is not directly interested in what the texts of the German Idealist tradition “have to say,” that is, their intended meaning, because this level of their discourse—like most discourses that fail to reflect upon the psychoanalytical conditions within which a discourse as such can take place—usually operates largely on the level of the Imaginary and its illusionary fantasy and can thus, perhaps even at most crucial junctures of conceptual argumentation, display a psychoanalytical superficiality. What therefore concerns him are hitherto unrealized textual potentialities, premonitions of which we can see in “marginal” comments or in various structures that often obstruct the general flow of a given philosophical system and consequently can be said to protrude out of its symbolic universe, negatively contorting it from the inside. Yet it is only by means of a thorough familiarity with this system and its surface affirmations that one can arrive at such unearthed possibilities and “reactualize” them. The analyst must, after all, listen to the analysand, even if, especially in its Lacanian mode, it often appears as if they are unconcerned or ignoring your needs and demands (for the goal of therapy is not the adaptation of the ego but rather a confrontation with unconscious, often traumatic truth). Žižek's own methodological approach to the history of philosophy, however, drastically differs from that of Deleuze insofar as it takes as its starting point the fundamental Lacanian claim that we can never say what we mean because there is an irremovable gap between the imaginary moi (“me” as the subject of self-conscious awareness who expresses the intention to say something, but somehow says something different and unintended) and the symbolic je (the elusive I as the subject that one deduces from what has in fact been said). Not only is language something that exerts control over us more than we have power over it (as an ego, rather than existing as a speaking linguistic subject, we are in a strong sense spoken), but the surface content of our own words often belies a greater (consciously) disavowed (but unconsciously known) truth, a truth that is not “hidden” in some deep, elusive place, but is so obvious that we often do not see it: “[t]he psychoanalyst is not an explorer of unknown continents or of grand depths, but a linguist: he learns to decode the writing that is already there, under his eyes, open to the look of everyone.” [37] In the slips and slides of discourse, in seemingly meaningless hints and gestures, we catch a glimpse of the Real as that which cannot be said directly in discourse but around which it eternally moves, acting as a black hole drawing in everything towards it, or what Lacan refers to as its “cause” or “truth”:

Keeping this in mind, we can easily see that Žižek's reading of German Idealism, by following its unconscious Grundlogik, is an attempt to psychoanalytically construct what the tradition in fact tries to say but cannot, by revealing what has been repressed in the first-level propositional affirmations of its texts. In other words, to borrow a Lacanian phrase, it tries to hit their cause. Although one can, of course, take issue with this methodology, one must admit that critics who take issue with Žižek's “selective” reading or “obvious misinterpretations” often just miss the point: they fail to see the underlying systematicity evident in his engagement with the tradition or understand why the conceptual moments he draws upon are so important.

In the spirit of Hegel and Schelling, who, in the uncertain aftermath of Kant, sought to articulate a philosophical system that could guarantee the latter's intuition of the irreducible autonomy of the subject, [39] Žižek like Lacan before him is convinced that there is something genuinely real and insurmountable in the experience of human freedom. Starting from psychoanalysis' insight into the constitutive disharmony between mind and body as a key to understanding its true essence, Žižek returns to German Idealism to see how the notion is conceptually refracted there. But in this respect Žižek's method is not a textual reconstruction of their arguments through an act of classico-philological retrieval nor is it an attempt to polish them up by using new resources at our disposal. What he notices is something primordially at odds with their surface content, which rather than rendering the texts of German Idealism logically inconsistent is more profoundly indicative of some kind of internal unconscious struggle, a struggle that is philosophically revealing and whose exploration—now made possible by the clinical tools of psychoanalysis—promises to unearth new ways of approaching its fundamental concepts. Finding premonitions of Todestrieb protruding out of the imaginary-symbolic space of its discourse, Žižek sees a disavowed truth lurking “beneath” the tradition's own attempts to think substance as subject by means of a dialectical interconnecting of mind and body, a disavowed truth that reduces the latter to a mere reaction formation, a defence from the true horror of subjectivity finally brought to the fore by Kant's account of transcendental freedom. After all, if German Idealism's breakthrough is the freedom of the subject, according to Žižek we must also recognize that “our experience of freedom is properly traumatic.” [40] Consequently Žižek gives us resources to think how, if we attentively follow the tradition's conceptual movements, we can see traces of an operative logic ephemerally emerging from time to time at crucial moments only to be covered up by preceding steps, so that our task is to reconstruct retroactively this hidden Grundlogik constantly interfering with what the tradition takes itself to be, if we are to come to terms with the disturbing metaphysics of freedom demanded by its founding intuitions. However, the methodology of such a psychoanalytical reconstruction of philosophical trauma around which an entire tradition circulates as its unconscious cause or truth displays an important paradox that deserves to be highlighted, which we can elucidate by means of Žižek's discussion of the legend of Eppur si muove:

Likewise, the alternative history of German Idealism that I develop in the following in a strong sense did not happen as a historical fact. Little if any evidence points towards it, and often the philological references that I have gathered can be easily opposed by numerous counter-examples. However, this is not the point: although this account of German Idealism's failed encounter with its inner truth is in many ways nothing but a fiction, this does not prevent it from directly expressing the subjective position that each of its representatives holds (even if it falsely capitulates their conscious interpretation of what they are doing) in a manner that other philosophical methodologies cannot, for what concerns us are traces of the Real in imaginary-symbolic constructs and their logic. After all, “when truth is too traumatic to be confronted directly, it can only be accepted in the guise of a fiction.” [42]

2.2 A Metaphysics of the Real: An Hegelian or a Schellingian Project?

Central to Žižek's metaphysics of the Real as a psychoanalytical reactualization of German Idealism is his stark emphasis on the indispensable significance of Hegel. In various places, Žižek characterizes his own project as strictly Hegelian because, like Hegel, the enigma that occupies him is the possibility of appearance itself: that is, how the realm of phenomenal reality could emerge from the self-actualization of substance. Hegel is said to be the first to understand this question in terms of inscribing the subject into the absolute: a subject that, in the Kantian aftermath, is understood as intrinsically irreducible to the immanent ontological field that brought it forth, and that can freely mediate the latter for itself through its own idealizing activity. In this sense, Hegel's metaphysics could structurally supply the missing principle of a Lacanian metapsychology. Through Hegel, Žižek believes he can show that subjectivity is not illusory by situating idealism into the heart of materialism as an irruptive event, the claim being that premonitions of this can be seen throughout Hegel's philosophy. Apparently arguing by means of resources found in the latter for a self-splitting or of the noumenal within the dark pre-history of subjectivity, Žižek tries to show how the only consistent way to explain why there is experience is to posit an ontological catastrophe at the basis of the subject. Consequently, it would appear that Žižek makes the following his axiomatic first principle thanks to a direct confrontation with Hegel: Freedom is not a raw, brute fact, but an expression of the caustic collapse of material being, a brisure in the heart of Real, which is synonymous with the subject itself; “it designates [...] the primordial Big Bang, the violent self-contrast by means of which the balance and inner peace of the Void of which mystics speak are perturbed, thrown out of joint.” [43]

But the overtly Hegelian nature of Žižek's project does not go without saying. In one essay, Žižek makes a claim that to many readers must appear out of place insofar as he gives it no qualification: “Hegel's 'overcoming' of Schelling is a case in itself: Schelling's reaction to Hegel's idealist dialectic was so strong and profound that more and more it is counted as the next (and concluding) step in the inner development of German Idealism.” [44] What is more, this claim is repeated almost verbatim in Less Than Nothing. [45] The effect of this comment is twofold: not only does it strike those immersed within “conventional,” textbook accounts of the history of philosophy as essentially wrong (which, it must be said, are losing credibility as Fichte and Schelling research has finally gained an autonomy of its own), but it also highlights a fundamental difficulty at the core of Žižek's reading of German Idealism and by consequence his own philosophy, insofar as his parallax ontology is perceived as a reactualization or continuation of this movement. This problem is only amplified when one engages with Žižek's major works on German Idealism. In both The Ticklish Subject and The Parallax View, for example, there are praises of Schelling as the greatest philosopher of the pre-symbolic Real, of the nature of the impossible X, the je ne sais quoi, which precedes consciousness as the most central theme in post-Kantian philosophy and whose problematic uncannily reappears in the wake of the Lacanian subject. Žižek even goes as far as to say that Schelling was “the first to formulate this task” [46] and the philosopher who “gave the most detailed account of this X in his notion of the Ground of Existence,” [47] which is why his philosophy and not that of Hegel is “at the origins of dialectical materialism.” [48] Given that Žižek in Less Than Nothing describes “the key question” of philosophy as that of “how thought is possible in a universe of matter,” so that we should focus our efforts on “the very rise of representation or appearing out of the flat stupidity of being” if we are to avoid “the very rise of representation or appearing out of the flat stupidity of being” if we are to avoid “a regression to a 'naive' ontology of spheres or levels,” [49] the issue of whether this project is most radically accomplished by Schelling or Hegel is more than a matter of intra-textual consistency or classico-philological accuracy, but touches the very heart of what Žižek takes to be the program of speculative philosophy.

On account of this ambiguity, Žižek's own project of describing this process of the auto-disruption of the Real displays an undeniable oscillation between the characterization of this project as a Schellingian or a Hegelian one, even though he claims outright that Schelling is the culmination of this line of thought. Not only does it potentially suggest that Žižek tries to disavow too strong a relationship between a Lacanian-inspired metaphysics of the Real and Schelling, but it also shows that he might downplay the role that Schellingian notions play (or undermine possible roles that others could) in such a metaphysics, in terms of either our understanding of ontology (the universal), natural sciences (the particular), or politics (the singular), the trinity that constitutes the conceptual fold of The Parallax View, his first theoretical magnum opus. In other respects, however, it appears that Žižek may have recently changed or distanced himself from his earlier interpretation of Schelling, perhaps precisely for these reasons. Although Žižek, despite his constant insistence that his fundamental question is a “properly Hegelian one: how does appearance itself emerge from the interlay of the Real?,” [50] oscillates in his early major theoretical works The Ticklish Subject and The Parallax View in his descriptions of who most adequately answers this question, in his new masterpiece Less Than Nothing this oscillation suddenly stops. While this project is again and again characterized as Hegelian, [51] the former glory once bestowed upon Schelling as the great thinker of the “phenomenalization of being” [52] is not just downplayed, but apparently completely forgotten, with Žižek even going so far as to say that thinking the emergence of appearance is “what at his most radical Hegel does,” [53] thus contradicting himself. However, despite appearances to the contrary, the ambiguity does not thereby disappear. Not only does Žižek claim that “[t]he minimal definition of materialism hinges of the admission of a gap between what Schelling called Existence and the Ground of Existence,” [54] but the ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling relationship in fact gets radicalized in the middle of the second chapter on Hegel, when Žižek describes the latter's dialectic as “the science of the gap between the Old and the New,” and then without explanation jumps into a two-and-a-half page discussion of Schelling's theosophic odyssey of the emergence of “the cosmos (of fully constituted reality, ruled by logos) out of the proto-cosmic pre-ontological chaos.” [55] Although to many readers this may appear as just another “typical” Žižekian digression with no inner logic, the argument that I develop in this book attempts to show that it is anything but that. Insofar as Žižek himself claims that the only way to avoid mystification is not to abandon the project of the Weltalter but rather “to reformulate it so as to avoid the mystification of the theosophic mytho-poetic narrative,” [56] it appears that the proximity of his reading of Hegel and Schelling, when coupled with this brief and rare methodological elaboration, points to the core of his heterodox reading of German Idealism and thus to the core of his philosophy itself. Rather than being purely Hegelian or purely Schellingian, Žižek’s philosophy thus proves to be a hybrid of the two, an attempt—in some as yet unidentified way—to use Hegel to formalize Schelling's thinking, “saving” it from its theosophic commitments, and to use Schelling to radicalize Hegel, allowing him to draw out implicit but disavowed moves in his own philosophy and thus in German Idealism as a whole. But why does this ambiguity exist in the first place?

Immediately after his remarkable and provocative reading of Schelling in the first chapter of The Indivisible Remainder, Žižek goes on to argue for the supremacy of Hegelian dialectics over Schellingian metaphysics. For him, although there are premonitions of a radical breakthrough in works such as the Freiheitsschrift and the Weltalter, [57] Schelling remains philosophically inferior to his great rival because Grund and existence ultimately remain distinct from one another only by being founded within absolute indifference, which itself “is not a product of opposites, nor are they contained in it implicite; rather it is a being of its own, separated from all oppositions, on which all oppositions are broken, which is nothing other than their very non-being, and which therefore has no predicate except predicatelessness.” [58] Indeed, Schelling claims that “from this neither-nor, or from this indifference, duality [...] immediately breaks forth, and without indifference, i.e., without an unground, there would be no twofoldness of the principles.” [59] For Žižek, however, this means that “the [Schellingian] Absolute is primarily the 'absolute indifference' providing the neutral medium for the coexistence of the polar opposites” of the Real and the Ideal [60] and, as such, is at odds with the potential latent in his middle-late philosophy, a potential Žižek sees in its articulation of the eruptive logic of Grund and its relationship to existence at the basis of subjectivity. In this regard, Hegel provides a superior logic in which there is no need for a principle of meditation exterior to Grund and existence as two reflective pairs that determine themselves through their internal dynamic, which in turn allows us to internally restructure Schelling's own descriptions of the interrelation of the two. In Hegel the very category of “and” changes—it becomes, in essence, tautological, thereby enabling us to identify Grund and existence instead of rendering them mere opposites or dual principles founded in something external to their own inner movement. In the logical process of the dialectic, the third term is already the second, understood as a negativity or internal limit inscribed in the first, insofar as it has merely taken over, usurped, the primary position from which the movement began by asserting itself as such. In terms of substance and subject, this means that “this very reversal is the very definition of subject: ‘subject' is the name for the principle of Selfhood which subordinates to itself the substantial Whole whose particular moment it originally was.” [61] Nothing at the level of content changes: it expresses a purely formal change at the level of structure due to the tension generated by the contorting presence of negativity. The dialectical movement that goes (i) immediacy → (ii) negation → (iii) negation of negation is superior because there is no genuine return movement to the first, although it all takes place in a single, logically immanent field. The beginning and end do not overlap because something irreducibly different emerges within the first moment (negativity now being made foundational to identity), namely, to take the example that concerns us here, an “out of joint” spirit that has a degree of notional self-reflexivity in opposition to its ontogenetic ground, the whole within which it gave birth to itself. There is no need to posit a state of “originary health” of which the devouring restlessness of the negative cannot be predicated (absolute indifference as that which stands in the difference between Grund and existence and thus is equally in one as in the other) in order to explain the dialectical movement of reality and its relation to the absolute.

As we shall see, Žižek's criticism of Schelling gets more complicated because it does not universally apply to the entirety of Schelling’s work, since for Žižek the latter is not characterized by an organic unity or continuity, but rather by a series of irreconcilable ruptures. He draws a distinction between a Schelling₁ of the period of quasi-Spinozism (the philosophy of indifference), a Schelling₂ of the radical ontology of freedom as seen in the second draft of the Weltalter and the Freiheitsschrift, and a Schelling₃ of the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which he qualifies—very violently—as a return to pre-modern essentialism. For Žižek, what distinguishes the middle-late period of Schelling's thinking is, strictly speaking, the articulation of an ontogenetic emergence of self-positing freedom in a manner remarkably similar to the Hegelian dialectical movement from abstract immediacy to notional self-reflexivity, which goes against the surface-level theosophic inclinations of the texts. It protrudes out of them and makes them non-coincidental with themselves in such a way that we can psychoanalytically reactualize their fundamental movement by “tarrying with the negative”—that is, by encountering the Real within them. What this means is that even if the self-operative logic of the Grund contains premonitions of a radical transcendental materialism, Schelling is at the same time the father of “New Age obscurantism.” [62] Expressing a reliance upon and indebtedness to Schelling would, in essence, open up a possible connection between Žižek’s own thinking and everything he denies—the non-Freudian unconscious (in its Bergsonian, Jungian, Deleuzian, and other forms), “pre-modern” cosmology, Romantic theories of nature, theosophy and even its pop-culture descendant, New Age spirituality. In this sense, the very act of placing the logic of the Grund at the heart of the psychoanalytic subject appears to risk “destabilizing” the primacy of the Lacanian mode of the unconscious insofar as it opens up the possibility of interpreting it through a different account of one's relation to the pre-subjective life of the Real; covering up the pivotal importance of Schelling would seem to be nothing but a certain ideological act on Žižek's part. But here two remarks must be made. First, although it is perhaps a bit underhanded on Žižek's behalf to downplay the importance of Schelling for the development of his transcendental materialism, it must be added that this obfuscation is consistent with his overall interpretation of Schelling, for he rejects most of the latter's philosophy and needs recourse to Hegel even to reactualize the logic of the Grund that he sees as its breakthrough. But second, and more importantly, such an explanation does not solve the problem of the Hegel-Schelling relation insofar as this emphatic shift is simultaneously ambiguous, given the fact that Žižek does not distinguish which Schelling he is arguing against or justify how he is able to read the second draft of the Weltalter as an ephemeral breakthrough.

In this regard, by characterizing his own philosophy again and again as a Hegelian, but never a Schellingian project Žižek belies his overt reliance on texts such as Schelling's Freiheitsschrift and the Weltalter for his project. What I propose, therefore, is to read Žižek against Žižek not only to demonstrate the implicit, complex intertwining of Schellingian ontology and Hegelian logic throughout his thinking, wherein I perceive the nuance of his theoretical philosophy, but also to show how by unravelling this ambiguity we can find new resources to explore the obscure origins of the psychoanalytical subject and the fundamental structures and essence of the world within which it emerges. Yet if embarking upon a reconstruction of the Hegel-Schelling relation within Žižek's work can achieve this, it is only because Žižek sees his own work as an attempt to culminate the Grundlogik of German Idealism itself, which gestures towards the hypothesis that the intra-textual ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling relation within his thinking is perhaps less expressive of an internal inconsistency in his philosophy than of a fundamental problem inherent in the self-unfolding of that tradition itself in its endeavour to overcome radical idealism; so that, if by a dialectical reversal we turn an epistemological limit into a positive ontological condition, apparent textual confusion into a real feature of the movement itself in its historical development, the ambiguity will prove itself in a second moment to be a side effect of a sustained methodological engagement with the fundamental insights of German Idealism which thus deserves to be investigated in its own right. As we will see, this ambiguity is in fact due to a single traumatic kernel of truth that both Hegel and Schelling, attempting to ground the Kantian subject, bring to the fore in different ways, but ultimately have to repress or force into the unconscious, a fact that therefore requires us to use a mode of inquiry that goes beyond philologico-exegetical interpretation if we are to penetrate it:

In this manner, to raise the question of whether Žižek's project is Schellingian or Hegelian is misleading, for what interests Žižek is not Kant, Schelling, or Hegel as particular historical thinkers per se, but a psychoanalytically retrievable unconscious truth self-unfolding throughout their works, a truth inaugurated by the Cartesian cogito but from which the entire tradition of modern philosophy has been repelled because of its horror, but to which we can now have access thanks to Freud's and Lacan's groundbreaking work on the original trauma of the human subject. In short, my wager is that Žižek forces us to consider that what makes German Idealism so singular in the history of philosophy is that it is haunted by an unconscious history that is nothing other than one of the sustained encounters with the ontological catastrophe at the very basis of human subjectivity in human thinking, this concept thus presenting itself as a Lacanian cause or truth around which the surface structures of its great epics circulate as their repressed traumatic Real and whose movement demand being systematically reconstructed retroactively.

But the ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling relationship has another advantage: it not only allows us to construct an original and perhaps controversial understanding of German Idealism and its legacy by articulating its unconscious history, a dynamic spectral history of repression and the return of the repressed, but it also allows us to evaluate the philosophical significance of Žižek's work by situating him directly within its concerns. Žižek is able to rely upon Hegel and Schelling to explicate the origins of subjectivity and their metaphysical implications because he sees them as embarking upon a metaphysics from within a self-grounding transcendental framework, whereby German Idealism and the psychoanalytical tradition in its Lacanian legacy become uncannily close due to their underlying epistemologies and the need to make sense of them ontologically. In this respect, unpacking the ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling relation is of profound methodological importance, for it brings to the fore and deals explicitly with the critical difficulties posed by attempting to give an account of the emergence of the Ideal out of a Real that has been, from within the former, always already lost. The psychoanalytical fusion of Schelling and Hegel implicit in his thinking—a fusion which points towards a certain unconscious struggle inherent to German Idealism itself— either reveals or resolves a potentially fatal ambivalence in the conception of the Real, an ambivalence that risks jeopardizing not only Žižek's project, but also the development of any form of metaphysics from within a radical idealism. According to Lacan, the Symbolic exhibits what may be called a form of ontological solipsism insofar as it is an irreducibly self-referential matrix of signifiers whose relation to an external, extra-ideal world has been utterly cut off. Yet to give a theoretical grounding of our inability to access objective reality we must describe its dark pre-history in the orgasm of forces that is the pre-symbolic Real. Is the Real that which precedes and exceeds consciousness, or a pure lack that only presents itself through the breakdowns of the Symbolic? Can these two modalities be reconciled within a metaphysics? If so, can a hybridization of Hegel and Schelling help us conceive of the emergence of the Symbolic out of the Real from within the Symbolic by overcoming the opposition between materialism and idealism? But before we answer these questions, we should step back and ask: why would we even want to proclaim such a Cartesian dualism of mind and body, nature and spirit, the Real and the Symbolic, especially since such a form of subjectivity has been criticized for so long in the contemporary intellectual scene as no longer sustainable? What are its theoretical advantages?

3.1 Postmodernism and an Uncanny Defence of Transcendentalism

Although phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and more recently Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion argue for the primordial unity of consciousness and the lived body or the self's immanent auto-determination from the unfolding of givenness of the flesh (which indicates the disappearance of a radical subject-object distinction by the interpenetration of both in embodiment), Žižek makes the claim that such descriptions are intrinsically lacking insofar as they fail to take account of the experience of the monstrous and the traumatic irrevocably tied to the essence of human being. One cannot merely replace classical subjectivity with a more organic theory of experience that intertwines consciousness with a phenomenological auto-affection of the flesh. The rift between the spiritual and the material covered by the I destabilizes the very possibility of such a primordial union or identity: if we take transcendental reflexivity seriously we see, according to Žižek, a pure self-positing that tears itself away from any kind of immersion within the field of corporeal activity. The very possibility of the psychoanalytical experience as that which reveals a split between the energetic dynamics of the body and subjective, experiential reality presupposes an irreducibly antagonistic interrelation, a discordant dichotomy, between mind and body, which proclaims that the human subject must in some sense “protrude” out of its carnal materiality and be understood on its own terms. The claim is that the modern subject not only paves the way for the psychoanalytical discourse of the unconscious, but also sets up the possibility of a genuine encounter with what it means to be a human subject existing with an intrinsic relation to a bodily substrate that paradoxically presents itself as Other. We cannot just think the self that comes after the subject in a way that does away with the latter, for transcendental subjectivity brings to our attention a primordial truth of what it means to be a free human being that, in many ways, we have yet to come to terms with: that of a structural conflict between mind and body which divides our being into two incommensurate spheres.

However, the implications of Žižek's reactualization of German Idealism are not just limited to the phenomenology of the body. Arguing against postmodern theorists like Derrida and Foucault, who claim that the subject itself is merely an empty, accidental construction that arises out of the flux of historical experience, Žižek contends that by forgetting the ontological schism between mind and body that enables the self to be determined according to linguistic and political forces in the first place, they lose sight of the very formal structure of the I that is required even to speak of the endless temporal variations of selfhood within the contingent upsurge of sociocultural activity. The unceasing play of cultural difference, the non-finite proliferation of identities and discourses, can only be adequately understood through the transcendental framework offered by Cartesian subjectivity because, as that which prevents human activity from being explicable through solely natural or biological grounds, it supplies the formal-universal structure through which such change is rendered possible. The cogito is necessary for deciphering not only human embodiment, but also human historicity insofar as it gives us a clue to what kind of ontological event could have led to the emergence of something like a symbolic universe in contrast to the “cyclical” movement of nature. Here we see another advantage of the cogito that transcends its theoretico-explicative currency, or more strongly, coincides with it: as the transcendental condition of the possibility of historical contingency, the pure I always stands above all fixed, particular sociopolitical constellations and thus presents the always possible basis of ideological critique and political revolution.

But perhaps the greatest threat to subjectivity comes from contemporary cognitive science. In light of decades of groundbreaking research in neurobiology, there is a growing tendency to turn towards scientific models of explanation to explain away the uniqueness of human subjectivity. Researchers are not just constantly downplaying the role of systematic self-observation and autonomous discourses that deny the supremacy of experimental science; rather, what is increasingly coming into question is the infinite array of material offered by self-consciousness and the meaning of philosophical investigations into its culture and politics as structurally free from biological concerns. Instead of having recourse to first-person experience as it shows itself to us in the irreducibility of its complex dynamics as the site of personality (phenomenology), or the labyrinthine network of the symbolic universe of discourses informing our sense of self and other (postmodernism), they are able to explain the entire range of emotional and social characteristics through the nonconscious, asubjective pulsation of brute matter, the mere non-personal movement of neurochemico-electrical activity wherein the I becomes an epiphenomenal illusion created by a closed biological system of response mechanisms pre-determined by genetic code.

Žižek's argument here is twofold. Firstly, founding itself upon classical biology, contemporary cognitive science presupposes that every organism is a self-contained system in harmony with itself seeking homeostasis and self-preservation, which prevents it from coming to terms with the psychoanalytical concept of Todestrieb. Representing a malfunction in biology, whereby a person no more strives for pleasure and satisfaction, for the minimal possible level of distress and affliction, but rather for pain and even self-destruction, psychoanalysis identifies this apparently negative moment of short circuit within the biological machine with one of the defining traits of human subjectivity and thus of culture itself. [64] Instead of being a mere haphazard disorder or a contingent feature of a sick mind, Todestrieb comes to represent a necessary feature of the singularity of our being: the condition of the possibility of psychopathological self-destruction is ultimately linked to our very freedom because the two are structurally homologous. Secondly, what Žižek adds to this argument for the supremacy of psychoanalysis over reductionist biology is the following insight: if there were nothing but the self-contained, deterministic system of the neuronal interface of the brain, then why is there (self-)experience at all? [65] Why is there not just blind existence, a mere mechanism that auto-develops according to its own laws? Why does the nonconscious trembling of brute matter in its dynamic pulsations need to be aware of itself? Since the category of subjective experience is superfluous, unnecessary, to the materialism displayed by science, the mere fact of experience proclaims that neurobiological activity is not-all—that there is a gap, a series of interstices, which arise within its logical fold as a kind of unpredictable short circuit to which, perhaps, phenomenal reality arises as a response. Naming the place of this rupture the subject itself, Žižek's own work on cognitive science consequently tries to underline the inherent difficulty that the discipline has (for this very reason) to explain the emergence of consciousness, insofar as it points to a limit-situation within which the discourse itself breaks down.

Neither the phenomenology of the body, postmodernism, or cognitive science can just dispel the “myth of subjectivity” because all three of them, in distinct ways, need it to account for the very subject matter they take as their own. If the phenomenology of the body is to understand the very field of the (self-)appearing of phenomena to consciousness as embodied, then it has to come to terms with the breakthrough of transcendental reflexivity as a form of pure self-positing that institutes a subject-object schism rendering the very body that we live in Other to ourselves: “the subject (Self) is [...] immaterial: its One-ness, its self-identity, is not reducible to its material support. I am precisely not my body: the Self can only arise against the background of the death of its substantial being, of what it 'objectively' is.” [66] Postmodernism needs to presuppose the pure I as something over and above the contingent field of non-finite cultural difference that it sets up even to talk about the complex network of discourses irreducible to naturalistic influences. Lastly, cognitive science cannot discard the subject if it is to explain the very possibility of how a gap in (material) being could emerge so that there is the basic distance from self that is necessary for the phenomenalization of reality. If we are to understand the true nature of the human being, Žižek's contention is that we must reread transcendental philosophy through the psychoanalytical category of Todestrieb, for both seem to cover the same theoretical set of problems in an uncanny manner; this unholy marriage of German Idealism and psychoanalysis aims to reconfigure the contemporary intellectual scene by offering a comprehensive system that is able to respond to the intrinsic limitations of all three disciplines.

However, although Žižek's retrieval of subjectivity thus superficially appears to be an attempt to assert the unshakeable supreme position of the human subject against the various de-centerings that it has undergone in the twentieth century, this is an overt vel. Whereas most defenders of the transcendental ego return to Descartes, Kant, or Hegel to regain and unpack their conviction in the self-grounding ipseity at the core of human activity in face of its dissipation within flux of radical historicism, the all-engulfing force of structuralism, or the brute determination of mechanical nature, what intrigues Žižek are the various ways in which the cogito fails at its own task and the implications of this failure for our understanding of self and world. Instead of presenting an intuition of a self-positing substantiality that persists behind all representational content of thought while being co-given, co-equal, and ultimately fully coinciding with my own personal self, what we truly find in the thinkers of subjectivity according to Žižek is the affirmation of a negatively charged void that holds together the sedimentations of personality through its sheer self-reflexive nothingness. Whether this be Descartes' inability to establish the positive characteristics of the I that necessarily thinks, [67] Kant's failure to penetrate into the kernel of the subject an sich that makes experience possible, [68] or Hegel's early account of the night of the world, [69] what is obvious to Žižek is that the impervious, vacuous core of subjectivity is simultaneously its condition of possibility and impossibility. Consequently, what interests Žižek are two things: (i) the traces of this abyssal nature of subjectivity that can be found in modern philosophy, which immanently problematizes all attempts to ground experience in the intuition of a self-positing substantial core of existential familiarity and transparency; and (ii) how this grounding insight into transcendental reflexivity and the deadlocks it generates are schematized under the textual surface in different modalities by Kant and his followers, yet in such a way that they display in them a hidden logic implicitly working itself out throughout the entire tradition that can be retroactively constructed and used today in order to combat a range of theoretical problems that plague us.

3.2 Idealism and its Shadow: Materialism in the Cracks

However, to return to German Idealism and its “rampant” transcendentalist inclinations with the intention of retrieving a conception of the subject able to respond to perceived dead ends in contemporary intellectual discourse presents an immediate problem. In order to articulate an account of experience that can combine psychoanalysis and modern subjectivity in a manner capable of combating the phenomenology of the body, postmodern discourse theory, and cognitive science, Žižek must fight against the anti-materialistic tendencies evident in the German Idealist tradition itself. Žižek's fundamental thesis is—perhaps counter-intuitively—that it is the latter's very descriptions of the non-material, purely spiritual I that point the way. The nothingness of the cogito reveals more than a form of ontological dualism, the horrifying split nature of subjectivity that forever haunts psychic life: not only is the cogito unable to find an existential or ontological interiority at the heart of one's own most personal being—being a mere formal void that guarantees the self-sameness of identity through phenomenal time, the I is an empty set—but the very gesture of a self-grounding idealism that it sets into play shows itself to be structurally incomplete and riddled with holes. In modernity's irreversible establishment of the primary function of the cogito (as a synthesizing activity that idealizes our contact with the world in such a way that we lose contact with real entities non-mediated by mind) Žižek argues that we immediately come face to face with the internal limitation and contradiction of idealism as such, insofar as absolute mediation is not possible for the subject. Instead of exhibiting a smooth transcendentally constituted fabric of experience freely brought forth by the subject on its Godlike throne, idealism generates in and of itself irremovable and unpredictable moments of blockage and obstruction that infringe upon the subject's totalizing claims for autocratic autonomy and a complete, undisturbed idealization of experience. In other words, every attempt of idealism to affirm itself as “all,” to set the stage for the transcendental constitution of phenomenal reality as an almighty, full-blown “hallucination,” fails: within idealism there is always something uncannily more than ideal, an extimacy that corrodes it from the inside and cannot be explained from within its free idealization of the world.

Taking the inevitable failure of self-grounding idealism to fully posit itself as a guide, Žižek's reading of German Idealism focuses on what he perceives as an ambiguous relationship in its texts: between such a self-grounding idealism, and the spectral presence of what appears as a form of materialism within its ideal-synthetic fold that must somehow be posited as theoretically more fundamental and primordial après-coup. The agonizing tension within ideality as it tries to constitute the world of experience suggests that, although a non-mediated, purely material reality has been forever lost due to the idealizing activity rendered possible by the subject, we can still, through the very limitations, blockages, and obstructions of this activity, negatively catch a glimpse of it, the very inconsistency of thought guaranteeing that we gain knowledge of reality “outside” our representations. The figure of Fichte is of utmost importance in this context for comprehending the conceptual contours of Žižek's position. Instead of being a contradictory, deficient concept within the internal trajectory of German Idealism that automatically reveals Fichte's inconsequentiality and impotence as a thinker, the concept of Anstoß manifests the truth of the materialism-idealism relation expressed within the tradition, albeit in a manner that he does not explicitly thematize. In Fichtean subjective idealism, the I is the axiomatic starting point of philosophy. Even the not-I, the entire sphere of everything that presents itself within consciousness as “extra-subjective” content, is freely posited and brought forth by the self-grounding activity of the absolute subject, in effect robbing it of any alterity that it would possess in itself as a material, non-mediated being with its own interiority that thrusts itself upon consciousness. In other words, the not-I does not affect the I through a form of causality. Yet because of the double meaning of Anstoß as a hindrance and impetus, as something that obstructs and incites our activity, one cannot just say that the Anstoß is a mere obstacle created by the subject so that it can have the necessary degree of resistance needed in order concretely to assert and actualize its own freedom. Although the not-I depends upon the pure I for its meaning, the former of itself cannot be reduced to the idealizing activity set up by the latter: it is not “like the games the proverbial perverted ascetic saint plays with himself by way of inventing ever new temptations and then, by overcoming them, confirming his strength.” For if this were so, “it would present a case of the hollow playing of the subject with itself, and we would never reach the level of objective reality.” [70] There is therefore an element of speculative truth in Fichte that Žižek wants to bring to the fore: even if the circle of idealism is a self-enclosed, free creation rendered possible by the subject, due to the painful curvature of this space we must nevertheless speak of a negative materialism in Fichte's thinking. [71] Here, we encounter a paradoxical coincidence of internal-external limitation and inside-outside: “Anstoß thus designates the moment of the 'run-in,' the hazardous knock, the encounter of the Real in the midst of the ideality of the absolute I: there is no subject without Anstoß, without the collision with an element of irreducible facticity and contingency—'the I is supposed to encounter within itself something foreign,” [72] some inassimilable body that sticks in its throat like a bone. According to Žižek, this truth is then later radicalized by Hegel's and Schelling's own response to Fichte's thinking insofar as they realize it gives us the necessary resources we need to develop a metaphysics while never leaving the transcendental idealist framework.

Žižek's own theoretical position is therefore a rather precarious one. It contends that it is only from within the deadlock and limitations of a full-blown idealism asserting the ultimate irreducibility of mind and subjectivity to matter. Here we must think of Žižek's philosophy as a turning inside-out of Jacobi's challenge that idealism must become a speculative egoism by following it to its logical conclusion: “[t]he transcendental idealist [...] must have the courage to assert the strongest idealism that has ever been taught, and not even to fear the charge of speculative egoism” [73] —that we can develop a truly speculative materialism up to the task of explaining the emergence of experience, for it also suggests that only a full-blown idealism is truly capable of disclosing crucial facts about the nature of materiality. However, such a materialism rests upon the apparently paradoxical claim that it is the very auto-collapse of idealism that is epistemologically capable of overcoming itself and describing the world in itself. As Adrian Johnston says, “materialism [...] formulates itself vis-à-vis the deadlocks internal to radical transcendental idealism. On this account, materialism is philosophically tenable solely as the spectral inverse of idealism, accompanying it as the shadow cast by idealism's insurmountable incompleteness.” [74] But the stark consequences of this thesis must be brought to the fore: it claims that all forms of radical idealism always already contain traces of materialism in their blind spots, even if they do not recognize this. Yet how are we to grasp this overlapping of the Real and the Ideal, this contradictory mode of inclusion/exclusion, internal/external, presence/absence, from within a logical space that by its very essence proclaims to exclude it? How can this impossible feat of a materialism within the cracks of idealism be accomplished?

3.3 A Metaphysics of the Disjunctive “and”

By zoning in on the limitations of idealization, the experiences of internal resistance within its own self-enclosed phenomenal space (experiences that reveal a difficult truth concerning the impotence of self-positing idealist freedom), Žižek tries to construct his own metaphysics. Only able to sustain itself from within the cracks of transcendental synthesis, his parallax ontology functions within the impossible in-between of spectral materialism and full-blown subjective idealism. But Žižek does not just claim that the latter is wholly untenable because its internal tension proclaims that there is necessarily an extimate, spectral presence of the Real within the Ideal haunting it due to its impotence to hallucinate its own world. What is more, the very nature of idealizing activity must tell us something about the nature of the world as it is in itself and this in two ways: firstly, we cannot just understand our own inability to grasp the Real as a mere limitation due to the finitude of human cognition, but must see this inability as revelatory of an ontological state of affairs—the subject is, after all, an event in the world, such that our entrapment in the solipsistic circuitry of ideality is always already minimally revelatory of that which we are searching for once we make a parallax shift in perspective. Secondly, the very inconsistency of our notional apparatus points to the fact that there can be no absolute constructionism, which appears to epistemologically justify the possibility of using the internal limitations and obstructions of ideality to overcome ideality's very self-enclosure. The goal of Žižek's materialism is to seek to understand the precise philosophical status of the free ideal constitution of the world and how and why this autonomous register could collapse. In other words, its defining feature is that, although it strives to maintain the ontological significance of the irreconcilable difference between materialism and idealism, it searches for a way to overcome this absolute opposition at the epistemological level so that the conflict between them does not infringe upon knowledge. If the self-grounding gesture of idealism expresses a constitutive opposition to materiality, and its failure is indicative of the phantom-like presence of the latter in the former, then this disharmonious non-relation must reveal a method of explaining it.

The underlying question guiding Žižek's ontology is therefore the following: What do the internal obstructions in idealization and the fact of ideality itself tell us about the mind-body relation: that is, our connection to the vital movement of being? Whereas there have been for some time in the contemporary intellectual scene two options for understanding the relationship of consciousness and world—their dynamic interconnectivity and unity in phenomenological accounts of the lived body or the outright rejection of the importance of lived first-person experience as a mere epiphenomenal effect due to the mechanical movement of nature or the structures guiding discourse, both of which comprise a disavowal of the primordial self-reflexive ipseity of the subject—Žižek opts for a third. What is noticeable in all of these approaches is not only an inability to grasp the true insight unveiled by a transcendental freedom, but also the latter's direct consequence: namely, the experience of idealistic disintegration and failure, the two types of experiences being so crucial in Lacanian psychoanalysis for our understanding of psychopathologies and psychogenesis that for Žižek they demand the rehabilitation of the ontologically schismatic duality opened up by Cartesian subjectivity. These are not merely revelatory of the structure of an individual psyche lost in disarray, but rather reveal a basic metaphysical truth of subjectivity by presenting a world where “the mind and body are, so to speak, negatively related—oppositional discord is, obviously, a form of relation.” [75] Pointing towards the subject being more than the matter it inhabits, insofar as the symbolic structures constituting psychic life display a quasi-absolute degree of freedom from purely naturalistic activity, the psychoanalytical experience proclaims that these two zones must resist, must be in perpetual conflict with, one another, so that the structure of psychoanalytical subjectivity is brought close to an archaic form of modern dualism while calling for a radical reconfiguration of the latter's split between mind and body. Accordingly, Žižek's attempt to think materialism and idealism requires a far-reaching remodulation of the logical conjunctive between the two into a form of psychotic non-relation, insofar as transcendentalism implies a kind of negative space isolated unto itself and alienated from external reality, an isolation that is simultaneously the logical structure of normal and pathological subjective reality. But what exactly is this disjunctive “and”? Žižek's answer is unequivocal: the place of non-coincidence between mind and body, the break or rupture between these two zones of independent activity, is nothing but the subject itself, where the subject is transformed from a mere transcendental-epistemological construct grounded through concerns in a theory of knowledge into some kind of self-positing negativity in material being, a bone in substance forever holding apart materialism and idealism. The lacuna in contemporary thinking is therefore immense: by failing to take into account the experience of psychopathology whose possibility coincides with that of freedom (as that which institutes an infinite conflict between mind and body) its representatives fail to see the terrifying truth intrinsic to our very relation to the world: something that proclaims the need for a new paradoxical form of materialism developed within idealism to be able to combat phenomenological accounts of embodiment, postmodern theories of discourse, and cognitive science, a materialism that would be at the same time a metaphysics of the disjunctive “and.”

Since it is Lacanian psychoanalysis that most strongly brings forth this disjunctive “and” as an irreducible element of human experience, Žižek's controversial thesis is not merely that Lacan brings to the fore something previously underdeveloped or neglected in other theories of subjectivity. Rather, it is much stronger—he claims that Lacan constitutes a true breakthrough in the history of thought that irreversibly restructures the field within which we can do philosophy, in a gesture that rivals that of Kant. Yet the great downfall of Lacan is that he is only interested in the systematization of the breakdowns and structural inconsistencies that define psychoanalytic experience, the antagonistic interaction of the three registers as the condition of the (im)possibility of phenomenal reality, and largely leaves unanswered the ontological question of the subject. Realizing that the Lacanian subject is lacking any explicit account of its genesis—which leads many commentators to argue that Lacan is a transcendental idealist or linguistic phenomenalist—Žižek is driven back to German Idealism to do away with this theoretical deficiency.

But if German Idealism, alongside Lacanian psychoanalysis, is able to help us elucidate the paradoxical “and” negatively linking together materialism and idealism, it is because there must be something homologous in their attempts to think the subject that would allow them to be creatively read through one another. By drawing out various passages that link the basis of subjectivity in late modern philosophy to fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, Žižek gives flesh to this disjunctive “and” by showing how the very fact of the existence of the field of ideality illustrates the necessity of the existence of the former, a fact from which many recoil. In this respect, if the Symbolic cannot assert itself as all, it is not only because of the ever-present pressure exerted from the inside upon its constitution of phenomenal reality, but also because the very “and” that precedes and sets the stage for the autonomous universe of meaning prevents the latter from being able to posit itself as a self-sustaining, total positivity. Idealization always collapses upon itself, and it is due to its self-foundering that we are led to see that there is a disharmonious relationship between mind and body that requires a new materialism to complement its internal limitations. The fundamental problematic guiding Žižek is consequently the following: what is the relationship between (i) this abyssal void of the I; (ii) the pre-symbolic, material X; and (iii) the mediating activity of conscious ideality? What are the “meta-transcendental” conditions of possibility for the emergence of the subject that could explain the systematic discord that persists between mind and body? Can the psychoanalytical notion of the Todestrieb as a form of biological malfunction and its avatars in the tradition tell us something about the extra-ideal state of affairs logically preceding experience? But in order to grasp the stakes at hand in this endeavour, we must first understand the problem of nature bequeathed by Lacan and how it sets up the coordinates of his own procedure.

4.1 An Uncanny Pair: The Cartesian and Psychoanalytical Subjects

Lacan's and Žižek's situating of the psychoanalytical discourse within the trajectory of modern transcendental philosophy could appear surprising. Following the works of Freud, it is clear that the father of psychoanalysis understands the psychoanalytical subject as intrinsically anti-Cartesian. Whereas the cogito conjures forth the idea of an untouchable conscious freedom, of complete self-mastery and perfect self-transparency as guaranteed by our capacities of reason, ratiocination, and deliberation, the Freudian unconscious does not merely haphazardly obstruct existential self-familiarity like some kind of accidental feature of human being, but rather puts all conscious activity in the clutches of a mysterious, obscure Other that by definition resists all ideational (re)presentation. The goal of modern philosophy as the articulation of a sound foundation for systematic philosophy through the free mediation/idealization of the world by means of the rational, self-grounding activity of consciousness is by definition foreclosed, for the very process of (re)constituting reality by the I rests upon a structurally non-representational process, a process that constantly risks interfering with the subject's synthetic mediation of self and world. It is no longer the subjective I that “thinks,” but the impersonal, non-subjective Es (the id): the “it” thinks in the same way that “it” rains. So how can “the subject of the unconscious [be] none other than that of the Cartesian cogito”? [76]

Although this may be true it is evident that, despite the qualitative remodulation that subjectivity undergoes in Freudian psychoanalysis, especially in terms of the nature and scope of conscious personality, there is nevertheless a series of homologous structures at the heart of both the psychoanalytical and modern Cartesian subjects. Most fundamentally, both rely on the splitting of being into two separate zones, the mental and the material, and the inability to reduce one to the other. Even if Freud's later theoretical works exhibit a propensity to reduce psychic processes to the vital force of biological activity, this very attempt self-destructs (as Lacan makes clear) in the face of the brute autonomy of images and words in his analyses over and against their subsumption within the pulsating activity of nerves or the movement of instincts. There always remains a chasm separating human psychological life from the mere flux of corporeal or instinctual energetics, because ideality and materiality are operationally different registers in terms of their inner articulation or logical makeup. For Žižek, it is not a question of the actual doctrine espoused by Descartes with respect to his own doctrine of the cogito and the essence of consciousness it entails, but rather of various theoretical potentialities and possibilities exhibited by the very structure inherent in his concept of subjectivity, which come to the fore in the aftermath of psychoanalysis.

Consequently, what Žižek perceives in the Cartesian subject and its various reworkings is the possibility of extracting theoretical resources from it that could be used to help explicate the enigma of human freedom and the essence of personality as revealed in the psychoanalytical experience of the conflictual (non-)relation that holds between mind and body. In Cartesianism and psychoanalysis, we do not come across a mere conceptually regulative difference between the arena of human subjective activity and the raw processes of brute material nature, which would enable both to enjoy a strong degree of epistemic autonomy insofar as both could self-actualize themselves in terms of a standalone language game with the appearance of being intrinsically incommensurate to one another despite being on the ontological level fundamentally one. Žižek is unwilling to reduce this difference to the level of useful “working distinctions” that have the status of an “as if,” for consciousness refuses to be completely naturalized. In a similar vein, in contradistinction to a theory of monism according to which both are merely seen as attributes of a single, overarching whole (however it may be conceived) and whereby both would offer differing expressions of an ultimately identical self-same reality, Žižek wants to bestow ontological heft upon the difference. The claim is that any account of subjectivity that attempts to reduce conscious experience to the register of a pure material or substance caught within self-sustaining laws, whether it be the neuronal Real, vitalistic energetics, or nature as all, not only does not take heed of the radical metaphysical implications of the psychoanalytical experience, but is also by consequence unable to propound a satisfactory account of what it is to be a human and our relation to the world.

In Žižek's view, the theoretical advantage of Cartesianism and psychoanalysis is their defence of the profound ontological difference between the registers of objective material corporeality and (inter)subjective cultural and psychic experience. Difference is just another word for an irresolvable two-way resistance that constitutes a battleground of conflicting, oppositional systems and thereby sets the very stage for the experiential reality that we find ourselves thrown into. To speak in Freudian parlance, one cannot understand consciousness merely in terms of the id-forces that comprise the bodily substrate of the libidinal-material basis of human existence. Although they may serve as the ontologico-foundational basis for all psychic and ultimately phenomenological life, they are philosophically inadequate to explain the full essence of personality and its pathologies insofar as the latter are constituted through the antagonistic interaction of forces that emerge within the tripartite field of id, ego, and superego. None of these alone would be able to articulate what it is to be a human subject, but must be implicated within an intricate psychological trinitarian logic if we are to hope to come to terms with ourselves and our world of experience. Even though the ego and superego arise out of the pre-subjective activity of the id—the id immanently generates the ego out of itself as a way to cope with its own organic insufficiency and primordial Hilflosigkeit to deal with the demands of its external environment—they are dependent upon it for their being, their very vitality, each constituting a self-subsisting system enjoying a level of genuine autonomy and irreducibility to the other. This very structure of independence is also hinted at in the breakthrough that is the Cartesian subject, which argues that although we could attempt to understand the ideality of spirit by recourse to the mechanics of nature, this attempt would ultimately collapse upon itself because something essential would be lost. It is not that the mechanical externality that forms the causal determinacy of the body's extensive field as the obscure ground of mind and its sensations is a mere underdetermination of mental activity. Descartes’ claim is much stronger: it is ultimately incapable of helping us establish the nature of subjectivity, even if some kind of paradoxical non-relation must nevertheless be said to hold between the two; the cogito's founding gesture exhibits an irreducible self-grounding that rejects mechanical externality in all of its modes (or however it may be reworked by reinterpreting it as nature, vitalistic energetics, the neuronal Real, etc.) in a process that not only makes it distinctively non-natural in terms of its inner structuration, but also thereby guarantees its capacity for transcendental self-determination and its incommensurability with other logical registers. The question is how we can explain this ontological difference opened up by Cartesianism with the aid of psychoanalysis, and vice versa.

4.2 Lacan, antiphusis, and the Parasite of Images and Words

In order to expand upon this problematic, two comments can be made that will enable us to uncover the conceptual limitations inherent to the psychoanalytical theory of subjectivity and that allow us in turn to draw out its similarities with the central conceptual problems plaguing post-Kantian German Idealism as bestowed upon it by its Cartesian heritage. First, for psychoanalysis, the language that we use mediates our very experience of the biological constitution of the body in such a way that there is a radical degree of separation between the idealization of the givenness of the flesh and its objective, extra-subjective existence in itself. Freud speaks of people who suffer from paralysis of a certain part of their body, although scientifically speaking the paralysis does not coincide with where the nerve anatomically ends, and when this is pointed out the pain ceases. Here it is the common, everyday belief of where a nerve ends and begins that structures the symptom. Thus, understood as a complex cultural phenomenon and not just grammatical structures of syntax and morphology, language shows itself as an irreducible element of experience and points to a discordant relationship between mind and body. Second, as arising from the facticity of cultural, historical experience, language appears to emerge out of a symbolic interpersonal network of meaning that operates according to its own intrinsic and self-unfolding logical matrix. Even if it has a basis in our physiology (vocal folds) and neurology (language centres in the brain), words themselves appear to exist in an autonomous world of their own that, in many ways, shows itself as a kind of external parasitic attachment to the biological unity of the body. Taken together, these two points assert more than the fact that both registers, the Symbolic and the corpo-Real, exist in disunion: the former even appears to manifest itself as a “psychotic” withdrawal from the latter into some kind of self-enclosed sphere. What is obvious from this is not only the intrinsic Cartesian structure of the psychoanalytical subject—here the deadlock of ontological dualism is amplified, brought to its extreme, by the advocation of a constitutive dissonance—but that the latter's philosophical legitimacy depends upon the precise articulation of the delicate relation between these two mutually incommensurate spheres. Although these zones are infinitely conflictual and never to be harmonized, they must nevertheless be somehow related if the system is to be held together. The Cartesian problem of the mind-body relation is consequently inverted: the issue at hand is not how both can be in unison with one another through some kind of occasionalism, but how the conflictual gap that separates them emerged in the first place so that there can never be a harmony or overlapping of each sphere.

Both Freud and Lacan spend the majority of their careers elaborating this field of disparate spheres whose interaction generates and constitutes personality. Rereading Freud through contemporary developments in linguistics and structuralism and even drawing upon cybernetics, Lacan attempts to reconfigure our understanding of the self in what he believes to be a more scientific manner than Freud could by excavating the strict logical structures constituting the condition of the possibility of the psychoanalytical subject: that is, the irreducibly non-natural basis of experience and the mind-body discord it reveals. There is something intrinsically transcendental about the project, even if the end result is apparently quite removed from the Kantian analysis of consciousness in the Critique of Pure Reason, Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, or later attempts such as Husserl's transcendental idealism. Any project that advocates the autonomy of subjectivity over materiality and a form of self-grounding idealization or symbolization of reality must at some level seem so, for the question of the condition of the possibility of experiential reality does not pose itself in more “realist-inclined” philosophies insofar as experience is here seen as just the effect or another instantiation of a large set of dynamic relations between objects in the world. As a consequence, fighting against Freud's attempt to biologize/naturalize the unconscious by highlighting that one can never escape the ultimate primacy of images and of words in psychoanalysis, Lacan relentlessly maintains what he perceives as the Cartesian essence of subjectivity. Just as the Kantian, the Fichtean, and even to a certain extent the Husserlian transcendental ego grounds itself and the fabric of the world of its experience in a moment of absolute freedom that establishes an insurmountable rupture between reflexive self-consciousness and the causal mechanics of nature, within Lacanian psychoanalysis we encounter the same logical move, but merely displaced. In the latter it is not a subject in any traditional sense, but rather the self-generating play of signifiers within the web of the Symbolic that expresses the impossibility of articulating a comprehensive, satisfactory psychological theory of the self only by recourse to the pulsations of neurological activity or biological instincts. There are two principal reasons for this. First, the Symbolic constitutes the possibility of the orbit of the Imaginary within phenomenological experience in such a way that it autonomously mediates all contact with the outside world, thus diminishing the latter's importance; second, as a consequence, it represents the predominance of non-natural (= irreducible to the ebb and flow of the material-objective world) influences in the explanation of the essence of psychic life. It is in this precise manner that the ciphering activity of the Symbolic can be said to obey its own self-grounding transcendental logic and be that which sustains the primordiality of the real-ideal divide: “subjectivity has no relationship to the Real, but rather to a syntax which is engendered by the signifying mark.” [77]

Accordingly, one can now understand why Lacan defines the object of psychoanalysis in “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power” as “antiphusis.” [78] With this terminological choice he is drawing our attention to the fact that what analysis deals with is not something natural in any sense of the nature investigated by science or understood by our common sense. Analysis operates at a level that is, by definition, incommensurate with natural laws. The effect of this designation is much greater than it may initially appear, for the human subject is characterized as “non-natural” not only insofar as the structural fabric forming the base of conscious experience enjoys a freedom over and above, or an ontological heft irreducible to, the flux of nature, but also because it transcendentally alienates us from the immediacy of the corpo-Real of our body, the ground of our objective substantial being, as the very condition of our possibility of what we call experience. Images and words not only precede us historically in terms of the temporal genesis of our identities (we are often named before we are conceived: a space is always already carved up for us in the symbolic universe before we can be said to exist in the Real) but also structure the logico-formal space that makes personality possible in such a way as to prevent us from having a genuine access to the brute reality of our own “intimate” being as it is an sich. After the I is spoken, that is, after self-reflexive subjectivity emerges, an experience of the Real is only possible through the ideational (re)presenting capacity of a symbolic network of signifiers, thus becoming impossible: a mysterious, ever-elusive X. As soon as we enter language, the Real as a time of “fullness,” “immediacy,” and “complete immersion,” if ever there was one, is subsequently lost forever, leaving us trapped within the fragmented, ontologically solipsistic world opened up through the Symbolic-Imaginary matrix.

Insofar as the symbolic network simultaneously constitutes the underlying structural support of experience and mediates all our contact with an external, subject-independent reality, Lacanian psychoanalysis appears to be a completely self-grounding transcendental idealism in the spirit of Kant. Whatever the human subject is, it is not natural in the same sense as other objects within phenomenal reality, even those that appear to have some kind of spontaneous connection with that which they find around them. Indeed, according to Lacan even animals have a kind of knowledge in the Real [79] that is missing in us due to the Symbolic. Although language is intimately linked with “our” freedom—and “our” madness, we must never forget, the two being structurally identical—nevertheless it thus appears as some kind of alien, foreign presence that cannot be understood in terms of the categories of the world because it has no analogue within it. But then the question arises: where do these transcendental structures come from? How and why do they irredeemably separate the human subject from the vital ebb and flow of nature? As a science of the symbolic network that constitutes the nature of personality and self-conscious experience, if psychoanalysis is unable to articulate the origins of these non-natural structures and the process of their genesis, it itself rests groundless insofar as the object of its inquiry remains unable to explain its own theoretical, ontogenetic basis: that is, how it itself is possible as a discourse.

As Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel looked upon Kant's critical philosophy, they themselves were taken by a similar problem concerning the heritage bestowed upon them. They asked themselves how the transcendental structures of subjectivity could be explained in a more comprehensive manner, how and why they emerged in the first place, and why they were as such necessary for the very possibility of experience. They held the brute givenness of the categories of understanding to be philosophically unacceptable and took it upon themselves to explore the Achilles' heel of the entire critical system. Their guiding intuition was that by undertaking an explanation of their genesis they would not only save the Kantian breakthrough, but also delve into the wider implications of the subject as propounded by it. Similarly, there is a brute givenness in Lacan's account of the transcendentality of the symbolic matrix because he never gives an account of its origins. When one reads his early and middle works, one is consequently struck by the impression that images and words are a purely external force that attacks the raw unity of the body and devastates it from the outside, thereby creating a denaturalized human subject out of a preexisting substantial whole. There is a movement from uncontaminated instinctual being within the positive order of the Real—the oneness of the body, the immediacy of an organic nature—to a being that speaks, to words as intruders that radically split the subject, destroying its immersion in objective being. The network of the Symbolic comes from an infinite elsewhere ravaging the unity of substance and precluding the possibility of a biologically closed libidinal economy as an inborn, innate movement of energy defined by materially articulated, instinctual schemata. Whereas in the animal kingdom this schema directs bodily energy towards various objects that it needs within its immediate environment through a kind of immanent causal push, language eternally obstructs the dialectic of need and satisfaction, fullness and lack, by instituting an ontological going-haywire in being. Preventing the flow of the search for homeostatic constancy, the subject is thrown into the endless deferral of desire and structurally loses the possibility of attaining its object. Instead of predetermined, biological goals, we are left with the objet petit a:

Within this advocacy of a split between the cyclical, balanced world of nature and the derailed being of man, the following theoretical concerns immediately emerge: how does the symbolic-imaginary matrix give rise to itself through a transcendental act of self-positing? How is it able to take control of and infiltrate the body, apparently lacerating its objective unity? If the symbolic order is really an external force, an alien blow, that in some way tears apart or obstructs the body's knowledge in the Real, how is it able to sustain itself in face of the corpo-Real of the biological organism? To put it another way, why is it not “rejected by this economy in a manner analogous to failed organ transplants”? [81] The problem of the psychoanalytical constitution of human experience opens up unto the extra-psychological/meta-transcendental conditions or state of affairs that must have preceded the emergence of the subject if we are to give a complete account of the psyche as such. Psychoanalysis must explain its own beginnings in a lost ontological time in a move similar to how the categories of the understanding must not be taken as mere elementary facts liberated from the theoretical exigency of explaining their genesis. Just as the history of the reception of Kantian idealism has shown that it must open up onto a comprehensive metaphysics that is inclusive of it, so too we must try to develop a metaphysics in the wake of psychoanalysis.

4.3 German Idealism, Psychoanalysis, and the Quest for the Birthplace of the Transcendental

Yet after the 1950s and 1960s, we see within Lacanian psychoanalysis a developing preoccupation with the ontologico-foundational basis of the subject. After the period of Lacan's “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power” (1958), which defines the object of psychoanalysis as “antiphusis,” there is a profound shift in the meaning of this concept that is highly significant for the development of a metaphysics capable of explicating and thus justifying the psychoanalytical subject. Whereas the early to middle Lacan focuses on the derailing capacity of images that set the stage for words as that which parasitizes the corpo-Real of the body, which makes the human subject radically non-natural by preventing its immersion in the autopoietic, self-regulating unity of positive organic being by creating an alienating self-distance within it, we encounter in the late Lacan a reconceptualization of the problematic. His new emphasis on the Real proclaims that one must radicalize this notion of self-distance. The object of psychoanalysis and by consequence the human subject are not antiphysical because images and words are an infinite Other to nature, an external alterity that arises ex nihilo only to penetrate into its secret chamber like a vandal and deface its sacred inviolability. The incommensurability lies elsewhere: images and language cannot be the cause of the denaturalization of the human subject; there must be something in nature itself that immanently moves it toward denaturalization. In short, nature itself is antiphusis, self-sabotaging, self-lacerating.

Although this represents a fundamental change in the meaning of the category of the non-natural, it only serves as a beginning. Insofar as the psychoanalytical experience is engulfed by images and words, which means that it is predominately ridden by non-biological influences, the only way to philosophically ground the primacy of psychoanalysis is to elaborate an underlying ontology that could explain how the subject could have emerged out a biological field that it presents itself as irreducible to. The theoretical merit of the Lacanian project is dependent upon the articulation of the workings of substantial reality that renders possible the birth of a more-than-material subjectivity out of its material Grund (to borrow an expression from Adrian Johnston), a paradoxical ontologization of the transcendental structures that constitute and found experience by separating themselves from and effacing their ontological foundation. It is exactly this problematic that thematically binds together the theoretical concerns of the psychoanalytical and German Idealist traditions, for according to the latter the only way to save the breakthrough of the Kantian critical system is to find a way, from within the self-founding idealism that it advocates, to reach out into the extra-subjective Real, or to speak in its parlance, the field of noumena, and ground it within a system that does not represent a return to previous modes of thinking (naïve dogmatic realism) but rather somehow manages to reach the Real through the Ideal despite the self-enclosed, self-subsistent ideal activity of consciousness. But how? The very trap in which we find ourselves proves to hold the way out:

Looking back at the history of the inner development of modern transcendental philosophy, Žižek sees a structural homology to his own task of searching for the ontogenetic condition of the possibility of the psychoanalytical subject, a question left unanswered by Freud and Lacan, in the tradition's attempt to find a way to construct a metaphysics from within the internal deadlock of transcendental idealism. If our generation of experience proves itself to be unable to posit itself as an absolute and unbridled hallucination of objects, then we must encounter some kind of paradoxical limit to our autonomous ciphering and constitution of phenomenal reality from within; the impasses obstructing the self-grounding idealization of the world demonstrate that, although we are forever stuck within ideality, we are not simply prisoners of the completely solipsistic sphere of the self-referential, masturbatory play of thought within thought and that a metaphysics of the Real, an account of the noumenal, appears to be theoretically possible. The inassimilable kernel of the Real within our notional, symbolic code points to the paradoxical negative coinciding of inside with outside, the Real and the Ideal, within thinking: the cracks of ideality cast an abyssal shadow that opens up onto the materiality of being, albeit only as refracted through the impossibilities of the Ideal, in such a way that tarrying with the latter offers a way to develop idealism into a science of the Real. Idealism has been overcome because the materialism-idealism distinction has become intra-discursive, that is, internal to idealism itself. In this sense, we should not understand Žižek's proclamation of Hegel's “transcendentalism” to say that Hegel, like Kant, remains at the level of a pure subjectivism: due to the constitutive movement of notional tension intrinsic to the concept of dialectics, not only is idealism prevented from being subjective, but, more strongly, “[t]he opposition between idealistic and realistic philosophy is therefore without meaning,” which is why idealism can be said to be absolute. [83] Embracing the paradox of the critical system, its breakthrough articulation of the irreducible idealizing activity of consciousness, the mediative structures that freely transcendentally constitute the fabric of experience, Hegel's philosophy is a daring attempt to rethink the possibility of a metaphysics in the wake of the Kantian revolution, to carve a space between idealistic ontological solipsism and a speculative materialism within the former. It is only within such a space that the question: “What is the transcendental subject's relation to nature?” or, in Lacanian parlance, “What is the Symbolic's relation to the pre-symbolic Real?” can be asked.

Žižek's retrieval of the cogito and his reactualization of German Idealism are therefore irrevocably caught up in his own attempt to develop a metaphysics of the Real able to explicate the obscure grounds of the psychoanalytical subject. Attempting to excavate the ontological edifice implied by the latter, his more overtly theoretical works pass through modern to late modern philosophy by means of an intuition of a basic structural parallelism binding together such seemingly different traditions. Although the starting point is always psychoanalysis—“psychoanalysis is ultimately a tool to reactualize, to render actual for today's time, the legacy of German Idealism” [84] —it is clear that Žižek does not understand his work as an intrusion or unmethodological tearing apart of the tradition according to extrinsic philosophical principles he is imposing upon it. In fact, for him, the psychoanalytical subject is not merely a direct consequence of German Idealism's grounding insights—there is actually something intrinsically identical in these traditions, so much so that it seems that the only way to fully realize the former is to supplement it with the latter and vice versa, insofar as they are both really dealing with the same central issues that each fail in their own way to adequately thematize. Describing his own project, Žižek says:

By zoning in on this basic identity, Žižek's philosophy doesn't lose methodological rigor, as if it made him blind to other, more broad-reaching concerns in the tradition, thereby reducing his thinking to a mere haphazard picking out of various conceptual structures and ideas that are useful for his own project to the neglect of others. Rather, it enables him to show how there is an unconscious, disavowed Grundlogik that repeats and self-unfolds throughout modern transcendental philosophy and finally comes out into the open with the advent of psychoanalysis, which shows itself as the culmination of this entire lineage. Because Žižek perceives some kind of self-developing truth inherent within the tradition that binds it together with psychoanalysis, his reading is pushed on by a sense of fidelity to the movement as such so that his return to German Idealism resembles Fichte's, Hegel's, and Schelling's return to Kant [86] just as much as Lacan's return to Freud: what is at stake is never merely textual faithfulness, but a hidden kernel of truth that has been simultaneously opened up and obscured by the tradition itself.

The effect here is twofold: while psychoanalysis allows us to reconstruct retroactively the Grundlogik inherent in the German Idealist account of subjectivity by bringing to the fore the relevance of previously underemphasized concepts and textual moves, this reconstruction of its fundamental concepts also allows us to elaborate our understanding of the psychoanalytical subject. It is not merely that psychoanalysis reveals a hidden unconscious logic at work throughout tradition; the backward retroactive glance is simultaneously a forward-looking task that tries to pave the way for the new. Žižek's investigation into the history of philosophy is never a mere activity of philological exegesis, the retrieval of the “primordial” meaning of a text, but a creative generation of new concepts that, paradoxically, must be said to have been already present in the now lost factical past, yet to have existed there in the paradoxical temporality of a futur antérieur (“I will have been”) whose contours are now first visible in the après-coup reconstruction of said past. A repetition is always the establishment of a difference, so that the legitimacy of Žižek's reading rests not so much upon his apparent “lack” of faithfulness to the words or the spirit of the great German philosophers, but how this temporal intersection of philosophico-psychoanalytical interpretation, the space within which Žižek effectuates his reactualization, functions and realizes itself. But what is the true breakthrough of the German Idealist and psychoanalytic traditions and why can only a psychoanalytical dialogue between the two enable us to see the conceptual impetus underlying the former's unconscious Grundlogik and also to come to terms with the ontology of the subject? Žižek's answer not only questions our conventional reading of this movement, but more fundamentally challenges our very conception of ourselves and the world.