Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

Introduction: A Metaphysical Archaeology of the Psychoanalytico-Cartesian Subject

This book is an investigation into Slavoj Žižek's return to German Idealism in the wake of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Its thematic crux is Žižek's attempt to develop, by reading the traditions against one another by means of their mutually compatible notions of Todestrieb, a highly original theory of subjectivity able to explain the subject's simultaneous freedom from and dependence upon its material ground. But it does not stop there: rather than just limiting itself to a recapitulation of Žižek's account of the eruptive, ontologically devastating birth of subjectivity out of nature, it also seeks to systematize the stark metaphysical consequences of this account. The fundamental thesis of this book is that, if the emergence of the Symbolic out of the Real—the passage from nature to culture enacted by the founding gesture of subjectivity—is the advent of a completely self-enclosed, self-sustaining structural system, then not only must its founding gesture withdraw from the scene in the very act of instituting the Symbolic, but further, even to explain this act we must posit the absolute as a fragile not-all wrought by negativity and antagonism. Or, to put it in terms of Žižek's Less Than Nothing (his latest magnum opus, or “big fat Hegel book,” as he says), as a series of less than nothings whose essence constitutes an ontologically incomplete field.

By means of a metaphysical archaeology of the psychoanalytico-Cartesian subject, an archaeology that is the necessary supplement to Freud's own archaeological investigations of the emergence of mind out of the conflict of unconscious drives and their vicissitudes, [1] especially in the aftermath of Lacan's structuralist reworkings of it, what we will see is that Žižek's own ontology of the subject goes far beyond the normal constraints of psychoanalytical methodology (which is so concerned with psychogenesis and its various pathologies) and radically challenges our normal conception of self and world, a challenge summarized by the notion of ontological catastrophe, which I extract from it as its key operative moment. In the course of the book this concept takes on a number of different meanings.

In a first moment, it refers to Žižek's interpretation of Todestrieb as that which incites the passage from nature to culture, a grotesque excess of life that is unable to control itself according to its own prescribed natural logistics and thus opens up room for the possibility of experience.

In a second moment, it names the self-positing of subjectivity in nature tearing the latter apart into irreconcilable zones, which, although in a certain sense conditioned by a libidinal-material breakdown of the biological system, is ultimately irreducible to the latter as a pure act. Taken together, these two moments underlying the emergence of subjectivity demand that we delve into the naturephilosophy that this account implies, a nature that shows itself (due to the very extimate presence of Todestrieb and pure difference within its heart of hearts) to be predicated upon painful tension and self-sabotaging tendencies to such a degree that its very being is co-incidental not only with the existence of death, disease, and monstrosities, but also with the always possible unpredictable upsurge of disorder and complete collapse as it risks touching the void.

In a third moment, the metaphysical archaeology of the subject is pushed to its ultimate limits. Delving into the question of how being could sustain itself despite its rampant and devastating negativity, what we will see is how the more we move towards the most fundamental level of the universe, the latter proves to be in its depths of depths not a dense, fully subsisting reality that exists by itself by means of a self-explanatory surplus, but a series of indeterminate proto-ontological states only minimally distinguishable from the void of nothingness that serves as its contrast. Wondering how this void of nothingness could be broken so that creation itself could emerge, Žižek argues that the basic form of ontological catastrophe should be extended from that of the subject as the breakdown of nature in Todestrieb, or the incompletion of nature testified to by the latter's constitutive tension, to the world itself as the necessary disturbance of this void, whereby the classical terrain of metaphysics itself is inverted: “[f]or a true dialectician, the ultimate mystery is not 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' but 'Why is there nothing rather than something?': how is it that, the more we analyze reality, the more we find a void?” [2]

In broad strokes, this is the terrain we will investigate—a terrain that is not merely difficult because it is nuanced and challenging because it is new, but also primordially uncanny and traumatic, forcing us to encounter aspects of self and world that we not only normally do not acknowledge, or continually disavow, but that we even try to repress. To arrive at and evaluate this notion of ontological catastrophe, my metaphysical archaeology of the Žižekian psychoanalytico-Cartesian subject takes three paths: one that traverses the wider historical context informing Žižek's project, another that internally reconstructs its reactualization of German Idealism through psychoanalysis, and a final one that attempts to extract and problematize the intrinsic originality and daringness of Žižek's metaphysics.

The first path consists of chapters 1 through 4. Chapter 1 outlines the ambiguity of the Real in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Displaying a form of radical idealism of a linguistic structuralist variety, it proclaims that the Symbolic operates as a self-enclosed system with no need of any external support. This not only means that human freedom is equivalent to an ontological madness, but also appears to foreclose the very possibility of explaining this passage into madness at its basis. Chapter 2 shows how, although Žižek believes himself able to find resources to overcome this difficulty in German Idealism, he can only do so by psychoanalytically tracing and reconstructing an unconscious history of struggle with the obscure origins of subjectivity he perceives throughout the tradition. Insofar as the psychotic non-relation between the Real and the Symbolic is also a rethinking of the cogito, chapter 3 shows why Žižek feels the theoretical obligation to revitalize subjectivity in an intellectual milieu that attacks it from all sides. Chapter 4 tries to understand how the Real could have given rise to the Symbolic. Contra the early and middle Lacan, Žižek argues that the Symbolic cannot be an external parasite that attacks the Real from nowhere, but must arise from some sort of self-sabotaging tendency always already implicit within it.

The second path, which unfolds through chapters 5 to 10, comprises the substantiation of Žižek's claim that there is an identity between the founding insights of German Idealism and psychoanalysis by retroactively rewriting the former's unconscious history. Drawing upon the late Lacan's ruminations concerning the breakdown of nature as the pre-condition of the Symbolic, chapter 5 outlines how Kant finds also himself forced to posit a meta-transcendental ground of the transcendental in organic disorder, even going so far as to anticipate Lacan's mirror stage. Chapter 6 demonstrates how the early Hegel, led by insufficiencies in Kant's and Fichte's transcendentalism and Schelling's Naturphilosophie, attempts to reconcile idealist freedom and realist system by inscribing the subject into the fold of being as an eruptive, world-shattering event, thus radicalizing Kant's insight into the devastating origins of subjectivity. Chapter 7 then illustrates how the mature Hegel psychoanalytically recoils from the ontological catastrophe at the heart of the subject's essence by subsuming it under the self-mediation of the Notion. It is only with the middle-late Schelling, fighting against the perceived threats of Absolute Idealism, that the true kernel of truth unearthed by Kantian idealism is brought to the fore and along with it its stark, even horrifying implications for our understanding of nature, human historicity, and the absolute. Chapter 8 gives flesh to the Schellingian-Žižekian subject as the vanishing mediator between the Real and the Ideal. The symbolic universe of meaning is not a high point of evolutionary achievement, but rather a mistake, the outcome of something having gone horribly wrong in the order of things and to which it is only a defense mechanism. Given the psychoanalytical horror that is the basis of subjectivity, chapter 9 explains how Schelling, although the thinker of its abyssal origins, ultimately ends up recoiling just like Hegel from own great insights after coming face to face with its full trauma, which gives further support to the necessity of a psychoanalytical reconstruction of German Idealism. After this concrete exploration of Žižek's methodology, chapter 10 concludes the second path by bringing to the fore his three most significant theoretical contributions: a rich ontology of nature, a new metaphysics of the void developed through quantum mechanics, and a nuanced theory of unconscious, each of which goes beyond a mere reactualization of German Idealism or psychoanalysis.

The third and final path is summarized by the word “paradoxical” in the subtitle of the book—Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism. Chapter 11 highlights that, instead of being opposed to metaphysics, radical idealism not only demands a metaphysics, for thinking in all of its intrinsic paradox and self-referentiality must be seen as existing in the world, but more primordially forces upon us a new domain of metaphysics, which first became explicit in German Idealism. Whereas all metaphysics prior to Kant is dogmatic insofar as it assumes thought's power to reach out and touch the truth of being in virtue of a special capacity (a gesture that is repeated by, amongst others, Badiou's and Meillassoux's elevation of mathematical formalization), what occurs in Schelling and Hegel is an intense reflection upon how the very process by which thought forms an image of being is inscribed into being as an event, whereby even the very philosophical position of theory formation is reflexively thematized both epistemologically and ontologically. What emerges is a metaphysics that can be baptized as critical because it is capable of developing a theory of reality that is maximally realist and idealist and therefore best suited to explicate the metaphysical whole of what is without falling into the downfalls of a theory that is one-sidedly one or the other. [3] Chapter 12 explores the paradoxical nature of this endeavour as it articulates itself in the intrinsically original and daring character of Žižek's own variation upon this German Idealist leitmotif and the problems it potentially poses not only for his own philosophy, but perhaps for any radical idealism seeking to break the correlationist circle.