Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

11.1 Lacan and the Prison-House of the Symbolic

As an account of the subject's own immaculate self-begetting from within the material flux of being as that which institutes the genesis of the Symbolic, Žižek's transcendental materialism is an attempt to explicate the ontological origins of a self-grounding idealism wherein ontology has been rendered seemingly impossible. Insofar as the Symbolic is able to generate meaning without external reference, it refuses all forms of realism: access to a Real outside of the correlation being/language is proclaimed a naïve position to be rejected due to the immense linguistic power that constructs our reality. Yet even if our entrapment within the self-referential, masturbatory play of signifiers is absolute, the ontological solipsism that it entails is precisely that: namely, an ontological solipsism whose very existence suggests that this very inability is somehow internal to the interior play of forces constitutive of being. The issue at hand is that “the transcendental standpoint is in a sense irreducible, for one cannot look 'objectively' at oneself and locate oneself in reality; and the task is to think this impossibility itself as an ontological fact, not only as an epistemological limitation.” [411] In this minimalist sense, images and words cannot be seen as mere parasites that contingently latch themselves onto being and disturb its otherwise smooth flow, but must be negatively indicative of some self-sabotaging tendency always already at work in its heart of hearts: “[t]he symbolic order is not a cause which intervenes from the outside, violently derailing the human animal and thus setting in motion its becoming-human.” [412] In other words, to account for the very “consistency” of the Symbolic we are called upon to write the great metaphysical epic of that forgotten eternal Past preceding our coming into the world as speaking subjects.

Such a conceptual move, however, poses an epistemological problem. Within the Lacanian registers, the Real necessarily appears as a lack. As soon as the Symbolic emerges as a self-replicating, self-evolving differential system that transcendentally constitutes the condition of the possibility of phenomenal reality, any direct contact with the Real qua ontological field is lost. The Lacanian thesis is a variation of structuralist linguistic idealism: it is not only that concepts do not need to adequate themselves with objects subsisting in a world that exists despite me; more radically, the free ciphering of the Real by the Symbolic means that signification has nothing to do with objective reality in itself, for signifiers only participate in an endless chain of self-relation that precludes access to the “outside” world. There is no room possible for a realist epistemology within Lacan because the very link between signifier and extra-linguistic object is cut. And although Žižek remains unsatisfied with taking such a theoretical edifice as a given and seeks to understand the ontological/meta-transcendental event that it must imply (thus recognizing the ultimate need for giving an account of the Symbolic if psychoanalysis is to find a proper scientific footing) the constraints that Lacan himself bestows upon discourse make Žižek's project appear intrinsically problematic. Doesn't the Real in itself prior to or outside of language remain essentially unknowable (because it is always already constituted by a subject, therefore produced by it, and never without its taint)? Isn't the pre- or extra-symbolic Real an impossible concept, for only that which can be spoken in language exists?

Nevertheless, Žižek offers more than another sophisticated form of structuralist linguistic idealism. If Lacanian psychoanalysis proclaims that the Real can only appear as a lack within the ciphering activity of language, Žižek attempts to break out of the correlationist circle of language by showing that the very inconsistencies of thinking offer a solution to the problem of how we are able to reach the Real even if we are trapped within the play of appearance appearing to itself. Because the Real we encounter in thinking the world is never “simply subjective, [whereby] it would present a case of the hollow playing of the subject with itself, and we would never reach the level of objective reality,” [413] thinking's inability to close in on itself shows that the pre/extra-Symbolic must insist within it. However, such a formulation does not directly address the minimal transcendental conditions of the possibility of attaining an access to the Real “it itself” from within the Symbolic. Adrian Johnston's formulation of the paradoxical materialism-idealism relation is highly revealing of the deadlock Žižek faces: “materialism [...] formulates itself vis-à-vis the deadlocks internal to radical transcendental idealism. On this account, materialism is philosophically tenable only as the spectral inverse of idealism, accompanying it as the shadow cast by idealism's insurmountable incompleteness.” [414] The problem is the following: even if the immanent “breakdowns” of solipsistic self-enclosure—the internal obstructions of language's psychotic dance—represent the inability of the subject to posit itself as an autocratic all hallucinating its world, they only point to a negative experience of the Real and do not suffice to offer a positive articulation of the ontological qua ontological. Of course ciphering sometimes runs into knots, but this very blockage can only be understood in the Symbolic by the Symbolic and in such a way that we never leave its prison. How could a kink in the Symbolic be revelatory of the pre- or extra-symbolic Real that somehow unpredictably upsurges within its sphere? Even given the paradoxical mode of the double-feature of inclusion/exclusion, internal/external, and presence/absence that defines the Real, it is still, formally speaking, a lack, nothing more than a notional antagonism in its ciphering code. It is unclear how this logical torsion, an internal hindrance in ideality, could serve as a foundation for a new materialist metaphysics, for there is no such thing as an outside or Other to symbolic mediation to which we can have access: “the Lacanian Real—the Thing—is not so much the inert presence that 'curves' the symbolic space (introducing gaps and inconsistencies in it), but, rather, the effect of these gaps and inconsistencies.” [415] If it is understood as the alien presence of some extra-ideal presence within synthesis, it can only be understood as such insofar as it is posited as such—or, as Fichte says, insofar as there is a transference of the productive activity of the subject to the not-I, but such a transference, although enabling us to give a consistent account of why representations often fail due to some “alien presence” that obstructs them (the necessity of a realist moment in a critical idealism), never leaves the constraints of a subjective idealism. We appear stuck in the most rampant form of correlationism.

Even if the Real can negatively show itself through an internal tension pressurizing the Ideal from within, we can never reach the ontological as such. There is always the correlation language/being wherein being itself is reduced to that which is constructed in the symbolic field of discourse, regardless of there being elements that appear within the latter that it cannot control. We may forever approach it as the negative magnitude contorting our notional apparatus as produced by the latter's very inconsistency, but this never leads to any knowledge of the Real in itself. From within the originary psychosis of a self-grounding idealism, there can be no overlapping of subjective and objective reality, for the very emergence of the subject as an ontological lacuna has as its founding gesture an irreconcilable rupture between the Innenwelt and Aussenwelt. Despite this, however, Žižek embarks upon an exploration of how a structuralist self-enclosed system preventing any direct engagement with the Real could have arisen by using the very fact of the Symbolic as a manner of proceeding. If the Symbolic is an ontological solipsism, then the lack of access to being we have must be understood as an event in being. In this sense, the Real-as-lack must ultimately open onto a metaphysics of the Real as that which precedes and exceeds the Symbolic and the Imaginary. But Žižek's Lacanian commitments would seem to render such a move unjustifiable. It is uncertain how he can balance his own radical idealism with his other materialist tendencies—indeed, his attempt to inscribe the former within the latter, to make the epistemic limitations of linguistic idealism synonymous with being's non-coincidence to self, appears to intensify the problem. How can a “negative materialism” based on the infinite conflict between mind and body found a new metaphysics? If we take as our starting point the (non-)relation between system (materialism) and freedom (idealism) as revealed by the psychoanalytical experience, then doesn't the logical category of the disjunctive “and” explicit in their contradiction prohibit us from delving into the retroactively posited past of the Real-as-origin to see how the latter explodes out of being as an event? How can we overcome the withdrawal into the nocturnal self of the world at the very birth of subjectivity so as even to see this withdrawal for what it is?

11.2 The Hegelian Real-as-Lack: The Painful March of Ontological Solipsism

The problem at hand is how to understand the separate theses that (i) the inconsistency of thinking methodologically justifies an overcoming of the realism-idealism debate from within idealism and (ii) given the fact that the Symbolic is always already minimally outside itself we can embark upon an explication of its origins without ever leaving it. Endeavoring to give Lacanian psychoanalysis the support it needs—a comprehensive metaphysics—it is perhaps to be expected that Žižek falls into such a theoretically difficult position. Lacan argues that we are stuck in language and, accordingly, that access to the ontological is impossible. Yet such a claim, if it cannot account for the ontological genesis of that which in the first place impossiblizes our access to the ontological, risks being merely a dogmatically asserted statement. This tension between the two major theoretical roles that the Real must assume—a notional lack and a symbolically excessive activity that is independent to all forms of correlation or access conditions—explains the constant oscillation in Žižek's position as he wavers between his strictly Lacanian and larger metaphysical and ontological commitments, even if the latter are always mediated by the former. Although most of his comments on Schelling, for instance, bespeak the possibility and necessity of delving into the Real-as-excess, [416] understood as the pre-symbolic antagonism that gives rise to the transcendental matrices of the subject (the “orgasm of forces”) he often refers to the purely fantasmatic character of such inquiry due to the impossibility of reaching the absolute beginning of language [417] and its necessary mytho-poetic component given its resistance to rational speculation, [418] often without acknowledging the problem that this could appear to pose to the endeavor of establishing the ontological grounding of the subject. Given that he identifies “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 “a regression to a 'naive' ontology of spheres or levels,” [419] the conceptual contours of this problematic deserve to be investigated in full. This is further necessitated by the fact that many fundamental Žižekian concepts directly exhibit this tension-ridden simultaneity of two opposed directions between the Real-as-lack and the Real-as-excess. His discussions of the night of the world in The Ticklish Subject, for instance, have a tendency to treat the Real as the other side of transcendental imagination, and hence as a logical rather than an ontological concept (Žižek warns us that “it is crucial to 'close the circle': we never exit the circle of imagination” [420] ), although he also bestows upon the notion a clear metaphysical reach by locating the destructive force of understanding preceding its synthesizing powers within the originary event of substance's auto-destruction (equating it with an ontological “tearing apart” or “dismembering” [421] ). This latter utilization of the concept—which he presents as a reworking of Kant's theory of unruliness—is then used to displace the mature Hegelian dialectical triad and argue for its inability to explain the passage from nature to culture, [422] thereby further intensifying its speculative reach. How can he move from one register to the other?

Despite this uncertain wavering between the purely logical and metaphysical or ontological value of Žižek's reading of the night of the world, other categories that Žižek extracts from Hegel show why he, as a rule, would generally have a preference for Hegel over Schelling, even in face of the obvious debt to the latter in his own transcendental materialism. The Hegelian concept “tarrying with the negative,” for instance, intrinsically displays the structure of the Real-as-lack and is thus, strictly speaking, completely compatible with Lacanian epistemology, whereas the categories he finds in Schelling pose a more immediate problem. Emerging out of Hegel's critique and extension of the Kantian thing-in-itself, tarrying with the negative is an attempt to show that the latter, as a theoretical posit, is superfluous. Objects give themselves to consciousness, but it is an illegitimate move to say that, beyond their appearing, there is an inner core of the thing that is hiding, ever out of reach of the transcendental ego's limited synthesizing powers, because even this infinite elsewhere of subject-independent interiority is itself only possible from within the manifold field of phenomenal experience: that is, it is itself an appearance. This becomes most evident in the experience of non-coincidence between our concepts and that which they “represent.” Within the inconsistency of the immanent structure of knowledge exhibited by these types of encounters, the object “in itself” shows itself through the form of a negative determination that burdens experience. We could say that what we come across here is the raw positivity of the object that obstructs our idealization and forces us to adapt to it, but only with the qualification that this positivity is revealed within the shadows cast by idealization's failure in such a way that it can only be brought forth or posited retroactively by means of a modification of the matrix of concepts that constitute our mediation of the world so that the original paradox or blockage disappears. In the aftermath of this epistemic remodulation, we see that what we initially experienced as an internal or structural deformation of ideal space was the negative refraction of the object's “true” nature such that the Real, less than a solid thing that obstructs ideality from the outside, is a pure effect. This has two implications: firstly, we do not need to overcome the split between phenomenal appearance and the thing-in-itself because this very split arises from within appearance itself, so appearance is “always more than appearance,” as it were. Secondly, the noumenon as a “transcendence” that gives itself of itself to experience is reduced to a mere defence against the potential horror of the immanent, uncontrollable flux of pure appearance, for if a transcendent object causes our representations, then our representations are guaranteed to constitute a minimally smooth fabric. As an illusion of a place wherein all contradiction is always already resolved in a reality complete unto itself, the noumenon helps bestow a sense of order and unity to the structure of experience even where it does not of itself display any, thereby taking the edge off of ideal fragmentation. The infinite (the perfect ontology of the noumenal extra-subjective being) only emerges as a response to the radical finitude of phenomenal reality (ideal obstruction in our dealings with reality), whereby “every positive figure of the In-itself is a 'positivization' of negativity, a fantasmatic formation we construct to order to fill in the gap of negativity” [423] : there is only the restlessness of the negative, the incessant internal fracturing of experience due to idealism's intrinsic limitations and inability to posit itself as a complete all, which always leads to symbolic dismemberment, so that noumena, now understood as the negativity of phenomena, their internal inconsistency, “designate the In-itself as it appears to us, embedded in phenomenal reality [...] there is no mysterious gap separating us from the unknown, the unknown is simply unknown, indifferent to being-known.” [424] In other words, what is on the other side of the screen of consciousness is not another reality, but “the same reality we find in front of the screen”: Žižek tells us to think of the illusion of a theatre stage, where what is responsible for the illusion is not the machinery backstage to which we have no access while the play is going on, but the very theatre stage itself, for even if the backstage and its mechanics are visible not only do we realize that the secretive reality normally “beyond our grasp” is exactly the same as the one being staged, but the deceptive effect is nevertheless still produced; [425] in other words, thinking itself produces the illusion that it has no access to being due to the transcendental framework through which it (only haphazardly) grasps (fragments of) the latter. The issue is not that thinking cannot comprehend being, but that, since it is inscribed within the latter, thinking can obtain no transcendent gaze upon it by which it can totalize it into a complete system. Thinking is necessarily incomplete—there is an irremovable lacuna in every truth-claim—because it can never get rid of the subjective gaze, a gaze that, while making knowledge finite, simultaneously renders it possible in the first place. Following this train of thought to its logical conclusion, we must assert that not only can we never know the system of the world, but if thinking itself is a part of the world, and there is only one world, there is no god’s-eye point of view from which the world can never turn back upon itself and close itself. The gaze of the subject is a non-suturable gap in being—this is what it means to say that “phenomenalization, appearance, 'illusion,' split, finitude, Understanding, and so on, [...] are inherent to the life of the Absolute itself.” [426]

Through its own subjective movement, thought comes to realize that there is an outside to thinking posited from within as that which insists and persists as the extimate core of all discourse. That is to say, thought is a constant struggle insofar as its struggle with itself is never a mere masturbatory play, but is simultaneously a struggle with the outside world. Its operationally and epistemologically closed ciphering of the world is capable of knowledge because the very inside-outside distinction becomes intra-discursive, that is, immanent to thinking itself because it is sustained by the activity of thinking, so that there is a paradoxical coinciding of the purely subjective and the purely objective: “[e]very tension between Notion and reality, every relationship of the Notion to what appears as its irreducible Other encountered in the sensible, extra-notional experience, already is an intra-notional tension i.e., already implies a minimal notional determination of this 'otherness.'” [427] Although we are trapped in idealization and the Real-as-lack is our doomed fate, there is no need to mourn the loss of some kind of immediate being in itself, some Oedipal womb of nature from which we have fallen: what Hegel shows is that, from within the level of the logical self-articulation of the reflective notional constructs of thinking themselves and the symbolic space of self-generating meaning they engender, we can “reach” objective reality because there is no significant gap between thinking and being at the level of thinking. The Symbolic is that which opens up access to being: we provide a freely developed notional construct that creates the norm for an intelligible field, a field that then may fall into inconsistency when said notional construct fails to render its corresponding phenomenal reality consistent, but inasmuch as the failure of said notional construct enables us to modify it we thus can be said to slowly and patiently track truth over time. Once we have seen that “[t]he opposition between idealistic and realistic philosophy is therefore without meaning,” [428] we can develop a metaphysics critically rather than dogmatically. This dissolves the worry regarding how we can have access to the world from within the clutches of subjective thinking. To say that the Real is a product of thought is not to lapse into a Berkeleyan form of idealism wherein reality is simply created by the subject: “the Real is not some kind of primordial Being which is lost,” but rather “what we cannot get rid of, what always sticks on as the remainder of the symbolic operation.” [429] As an aftereffect of this symbolic operation, it ensures that we have an indirect but methodologically secure entry point into the world by means of the inconsistencies that our notional apparatus generates in the freely determined self-generation of the universe of meaning, inconsistencies that unexpectedly let us develop an objective discourse.

But the limits of idealism entail that idealism is always already more than itself—thought itself is utterly incapable of positing itself as a self-enclosed positivity that simply creates its own universe of meaning; it becomes contaminated, as it were, by a constitutive “outside” as soon as it tries to posit itself in its own self-determining freedom, so that it must constantly struggle with this outside. This constitutive failure on behalf of thinking successfully to posit itself as all guarantees that there is a subject-independent reality that we experience and can speculatively describe:

With this insight gained Žižek, like Hegel, discovers an epistemological foothold—the productive space of ideal inconsistency (in the quote above Žižek is talking about our access to the Real from within the Symbolic rather than its ontological constitution)—from within which he can find the resources required to develop a new metaphysics. It is less idealism that poses a problem for the latter than the traps that it (unconsciously) creates for us as we attempt to catch a glimpse what “lies beyond” phenomenal reality: the inevitable and necessary symbolic dismemberment of a self-grounding idealism that fails to fully become itself not only creates the possibility of error, but since the first showing of the Real is always an internal deformation of ideal structure (a pure negative form lacking content), it itself risks being riddled with a thick layer of fantasmatic projections and unconscious desires. That which allows idealism to overcome itself also can hinder the speculative process. Yet, despite this, the Real-as-lack and the Real-as-excess do not stand in opposition to one another. Although the former is always epistemologically superior or primary, being the transcendental condition of the possibility of access to the latter, we are nevertheless capable of attaining that which is pre- or extra-Symbolic not only despite but more primordially by dint of the Symbolic's clutches. This is why, on Žižek's reading, Hegel's Science of Logic, while never leaving the matrix of self-thinking thought, can coincide with metaphysics and describe pre-subjective reality in its raw categorial purity and dialectical movement. Ontological solipsism is only apparent, for materialism justifies itself in the cracks of a radical idealism: the very condition of possibility of discourse means that discourse is always more than itself, even if that means that its very possibility coincides with its impossibility. Fichte refers to such a theoretical position—a critical idealism brought to fruition—as a real-idealism or an ideal-realism. [431] Although his own position may fail to execute this adequately, it can serve nevertheless as the most consequent description of a true, successful idealism. As Žižek correctly points out, “[t]he irony of the history of philosophy is that the line of philosophers who struggle against the sophistic tradition ends with Hegel, the 'last philosopher,' who, in a way, is also the ultimate sophist, embracing the self-referential play of the Symbolic with no external support of its truth.” [432] Hegel can accomplish this prima facie paradoxical feat because he is able to demonstrate that accepting the impossibility of leaving the “correlationist circle” does not fall into a naïve idealism whereby objective reality is reduced to nothing, but rather shows how even the self-referential nature of thinking itself always already depends upon and is entangled with the world, thereby attesting that the split between knowledge in itself and for us exists not because we are separated from the world, but because we are a part of it: “the very limitation of our knowing—its inevitably distorted, inconsistent character—bears witness to our inclusion in reality.” [433] In this respect, idealism (reflection, notional constructs, language as such) creates the space of reasons in virtue of which things can present themselves to us as they are in reality in itself. This presenting, however, requires a stage upon which their theatrical appearance can be performed, a stage that produces the illusion of a backstage to which we do not have access. Instead of merely separating us from the world, the reflexivity of the Ideal thereby allows objects to have meaning for us as something more than objects to be used by specialized biological or natural needs. We symbolize them, grant them a place in discourse, a discourse whose failures make it seem as if a world out there directly attacks our concepts and theoretical models when, in fact, we never exit discourse at all, for only its self-sustaining matrix can sustain phenomenal reality as a universe of meaning. This signifies, moreover, that to pose the question of being qua being, there must be a difference between us and being, for being qua being can only show itself to a finite thinker for whom there exists a distance within which being can be phenomenalized or phenomenalize itself by means of notional constructs. It is important to note, however, that in order to get being right, we must also be able to get it wrong, the minimal condition of which is satisfied by the ontological madness that is the basic structure of ideality as that which prevents us from having a direct “immersion” in the world and as such opens up the possibility of replicating being within itself; the self-stipulating norms of discourse internally guide the constitution of phenomena while their inconsistency demonstrates that we are capable of objectively describing them simply through the process of thinking only thinking itself. In this regard, Hegel's monumental achievement is the critical proof that one of the effects of the Symbolic's self-enclosure is that, in point of fact, it allows things to appear intelligibly through the reflective mediation of language. All we have to do is take the appropriate attitude toward the inner limitations of phenomenal reality as such. Paradoxically, a realist epistemology does not make a realist. This is why the choice between idealism and realism is false for the idealist.

11.3 A Call for a Critical Metaphysics

At this juncture we must underline one important feature of this argument for a self-grounding idealism that intrinsically contains an irreducibly real moment. If the Symbolic freely constitutes phenomenal reality “with no external support of its truth,” [434] then this suggests that from within its ontologically solipsistic dance of cybernetic ciphering, we can break through the impenetrable dusk of psychosis as we find, in an innovative theoretical gesture, a secure foothold from which to found a new science of being. But this means that we should not merely overcome radical idealism from within idealism (an epistemological sublation of the correlation): we must also overcome it from the side of being by showing how the ambiguities of idealism are in fact a part of the world's fundamental structure through an account of how being comes to appearance/thinking/phenomenalization (an ontological inscription of the correlation). If we can succeed, then realism and idealism will have become intimately dialectically linked. Not only would this entail a strong theory of thinking insofar as the latter would be inscribed within the fold of being as an irreducible event rather than as a mere illusory feature, but also a profoundly rich metaphysics inclusive of both realism and idealism given that both would now reciprocally ground one another (in realistic and idealistic terms) in a completely self-sufficient and self-reflexive whole. That is to say, we would have a new variation on the late German Idealist theme of the unification of system and freedom: or, in other words, another take on the Kantian heritage and how it radically changes the field of philosophizing. In this respect, whereas much of contemporary philosophy's understanding of idealism fails to take it seriously, often equating it with a form of Berkeleyanism (a tradition that runs from Kant's first critics to Lenin [435] and taken up once again by Moore [436] and most recently by Meillassoux [437] ), one of the greatest strengths of Žižek is his nuanced vision of the world that is able to use idealism's resources not only to overcome its own apparent limitations from within, but also to demonstrate how, if this self-overcoming is successfully executed, our understanding of being is simultaneously remodulated. Idealism and realism, transcendentalism and metaphysics, are not mutually opposed if you think them through in relation to one another, for the former forces us to come to grasp what it means for thinking to exist in an irreducible manner, a fact that has stark consequences for our understanding of the world at large.

After a long period in contemporary philosophy where there was a general disdain for speculation, what distinguishes Žižek so radically from others who have also raised the question of the possibility of a new metaphysics (perhaps most notably Deleuze and Badiou) and those who are now active in establishing this possibility is his call for a critical metaphysics and its superiority over a mere return to dogmatic philosophizing as a means of overcoming the heritage of what has recently come to be known since Meillassoux's After Finitude as correlationism. [438] For Žižek, the urgent call for a philosophy that can combat the apparent speculative throes of the irreducibility of the correlation in our knowledge of the world (if the intelligibility of any specific empirical truth-claim depends upon the subject for whom such a truth-claim has meaning in the first place, how can we even speak about that which occurred before the existence of such a subject without falling into ontic nonsense?) does not have its origin in paradoxes concerning “ancestral” statements concerning what the universe must have been like prior to humanity, as Meillassoux would like us to believe, [439] this having been proven to be an intrinsic possibility opened up by the logical space of the correlation as such, but rather what the universe must be like if something like humanity and its transcendental constituting powers are to arise at all. The issue is how the Real could have come to appear to itself—and although this may appear to risk an anthropomorphization of nature (“[w]e should apply here something like a weak anthropic principle: how should the Real be structured so that it allows for the emergence of subjectivity [...]?” [440] ), one should proceed cautiously. Žižek's metaphysical archaeology of the psychoanalytical subject is an attempt to think the intersection of the Real and the Symbolic, the coldness of being and the fervor of humanity, because if images and words, and by implication thinking, exist, they must exist in the world. The universe is inclusive, not exclusive, of humanity: a true speculative philosophy should comprehend both the Real in its pure non-correlationality (the nonhuman) and how correlation comes to pass in being (the human). Perhaps unexpectedly, the price we pay for this theoretical gain of re-inscribing humanity into nature, that is, the latter's minimal anthropomorphization, is a simultaneous denaturalization of nature and a dehumanization of humanity. Not only is nature now reduced to “a freak show of contingent disturbances with no inner rhyme or reason,” [441] but even if humanity still retains a certain qualitatively distinct status in contradistinction to other things in virtue of its autonomy, what we normally take as the great and sublime achievements of thinking are, in fact, grounded in a mere virtual re-compensation for our traumatic disruption from the Real. What thus makes Žižek's speculative real-idealism/ideal-realism (to borrow that German Idealist leitmotif) so penetrating and deserving of attention today is its ability to combine a profoundly idealist epistemology with a dynamic realist metaphysics in one single gesture, which shows us one path that contemporary metaphysics could take: namely, a critical one. In this regard, if Meillassoux's critique of correlationism is a call to station ourselves after (Kantian) finitude, it must be recalled that this is precisely what Schelling and Hegel did in their own critique of correlationism avant la lettre.

Žižek is able to balance the real and ideal poles in such a nuanced way because of his precise and original take on the breakthrough inaugurated by transcendental philosophy, a breakthrough that for him presents itself as the unthought (Lacanian) cause at the heart of German Idealism. One of his central claims is that if we read Kant closely, we see hints that what truly fascinates him is not how the subject brings forth its own universe of meaning as a new kind of metaphysical agent capable of guaranteeing the universality and necessity of experience/empirical truth, the two being identical for Kant, but “something quite different,” something that sets the stage for the “few decades [of German Idealism that] represent a breathtaking concentration of the intensity of thinking” within which “more happened than in centuries or even millennia of the 'normal' development of human thought.” [442] Commenting on Kant's description of the Copernican revolution (the experiment of seeing “if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest” [443] ), which Kant identifies with his own transcendentalist position, Žižek notes:

What initially appears as a rampant subjectivism wherein the ego reigns above the world proves on closer inspection to be something infinitely more complex, for the self-grounding field of phenomenal reality only exists because it itself revolves around the positively charged void of I. The breakthrough of transcendental idealism is precisely the discovery of this zone of negativity within the subject, that X that can never be fully appropriated into transcendental constitution and yet somehow engenders its very possibility, whereby it shows itself to be not so much a displacing of the substantial unity of reality from the external world to the conceptual forms of cognitive construction (a subjective Ptolemaic counterrevolution against Galileo’s de-centering of the medieval world of teleology [445] ) as the opening up of a new understanding of being, that is, of the radical ontological incompletion of reality, the breakdown of substance, provoked by the meta-transcendental conditions of thought as such. As the late German Idealist reappropriation of the subject demonstrates, what is truly unique in transcendental idealism is that the real and ideal poles are unsettled in one brush stroke: linked to the Todestrieb that destroys the homeostasis of nature and das Unbehagen in der Kultur that prevents our second nature from becoming a new substantialist order, the “objectal status” of the subject is that which is “no longer” ontological and “not yet” symbolic because it cannot be contained in either register in its pure form; [446] it is what Žižek sometimes refers to as the absent centre that, by protruding out of all ontological and symbolic structures, negatively ties them together in its very undecidability. Here, and only here, the real and the ideal poles intersect, so that both are given their equal due because of an unapproachable X, a je ne sais quoi, that relates them in their very non-relationality and whereby one leads to the other: “[w]e can also see in what way two lacks overlap in this impossible object: the constitutive lack of the subject (what the subject has to lose in order to emerge as the subject of the signifier) and the lack in the Other itself (what has to be excluded from reality so that reality can appear).” [447]

Although the transcendental (our subjective position) objectively exists in the world, it nevertheless appears to itself in its first mode as merely subjective. To overcome itself and pass over into a metaphysics, it must do so from within; it does so by drawing attention to the fact that, beneath the correlation of (the conscious) subject and reality, “there is the more primordial correlation of the subject (of the unconscious) and its Real/impossible objectal counterpoint, S-a.” [448] Although this may seem to be just another correlation (as Heidegger only institutes the correlation being/Dasein as more originary than that of consciousness/world, doesn't Žižek do something similar?) this is a false appearance. Rather than being a strict correlation in Meillassouxian terms this binary points towards the emergence of correlation within being: “this impossible/Real object is the very mode of inscription of the subject into trans-subjective reality; as such, it is not transcendental but (what Derrida would have called) arche-transcendental, an attempt to circumscribe the 'subject in becoming,' the trans-subjective process of the emergence of the subject.” [449] Žižek's wager, one that he shares with the entirety of post-Kantian idealism as a critical metaphysics fighting against any dogmatic breed thereof, is that if we are to truly break free from correlationism, no return to a “naïve” realism is possible. Not only is the latter always open to critique insofar as it could remain correlational in a hidden way (isn't its specific image of reality related to a subject? [450] ), so that the specific nature of the correlation, namely the ideal conditions of the possibility of intelligibility of any theory, should always be thematized before embarking on speculation, but more primordially it fails to give us of a grasp of how thought is situated/comes to pass in being and, therefore, the very ontological conditions of the possibility of its own status as a theory. Concerning the latter, merely explaining subjectivity as a purely contingent emergence amongst others à la Meillassoux bodes no better: “one should locate traces of this contingency in a kind of umbilical cord which links the subject to its pre-subjective Real, and thus breaks the circle of transcendental correlationism.” [451] In this manner, we should search for how the transcendental hints towards its dark beginnings (the pure act of the Real-as-origin and the unruliness of drives in the Real-as-excess that precedes it), the emphasis being on the ontogenetic process of becoming more than on the specificity of the transcendental constitution of reality for us, so that the fundamental issue is no longer so much how can we attain knowledge of the absolute (this already being accomplished by the first methodological step, as for instance in Hegel) but how does our subjective viewpoint fit into it as something that objectively exists: “[t]he true question is therefore how I (as the site where reality appears to itself) emerge in 'objective' reality (or, more pointedly, how can a universe of meaning arise in the meaningless Real).” [452] With this, we have come full circle and hit upon the great merit of Žižek's philosophy. Having already overcome idealism from within, and having opened up the space for a speculative philosophy, he can develop a theory that is capable of being maximally realist and idealist and therefore best suited as a self-explanatory theory of the metaphysical “totality” of the world, insofar as it can simultaneously supply the ontological conditions of the possibility of its own status as a theory and the ideal conditions of possibility of its own intelligibility in one sweeping move, thus making the theory itself extremely self-referential in its structure. In short, the theory displays complete systematic self-enclosure: it explains itself as a theory in both the real and ideal registers in such a manner that both depend upon and mutually ground one another in a self-articulating whole; it has succeeded at developing “a concept of the world or the Real which is capable of account for the replication of reality within itself.” [453] What Žižek teaches us, a lesson already brought to the fore in late German Idealism but since forgotten, is that radical idealism is not a closure to the absolute. It is rather a new approach towards it, a new way of relating to it—and to see it as such merely requires a parallax shift in perception.

11.4 Being's Poem: Speculative Philosophy and the Mytho-Poetic Parallax Shift

If Žižek is right to say that the founding gesture of idealism is an ontological passage through madness, then it would not go far enough if we were to admit that the opposition between realism and idealism has been already resolved at the level of idealism. Something is missing, for the real event that immediately precedes the autarchy of the Ideal, and whose exploration would enable this opposition to be also resolved at the level of realism (thus radicalizing and guaranteeing what Fichte referred to as a real-idealism or ideal-realism), is an impossible object of discourse. Conceding that notional antagonism can indeed be spectrally expressive of objective reality, and thus enable us to speculate about reality within ideality, to fully explain how we can have contact with the world where there is properly speaking no contact at all we must nevertheless acknowledge that we can never even indirectly reach the exact moment at which being begins to exist in the modality of the Ideal. The difficulty is much more severe than that the Real is always already minimally symbolized, since the Real-as-origin expresses two fundamental theoretical problems. First, insofar as its abyss of unconscious decision represents a pure self-instituting difference that unpredictably splits the world into two new logically irreconcilable registers, it cannot be deduced from the auto-movement of the Real; there is no “transition,” but only a self-caused “leap” that forever evades complete conceptual or natural dialectic mediation. Second, because this act withdraws in the very gesture of giving birth to the Symbolic, it lies stricto sensu “beyond” the grasp of the latter and can never appear within it, not even negatively. It is in this precise manner that the subject is neither Real nor Symbolic and is only expressible through a series of paradoxical avatars unable to bestow content upon it (the disjunctive “and,” the “in-between,” the “abyss of freedom,” the “vanishing mediator,” and so on). A philosophical discourse about the subject is thus intrinsically paradoxical because the latter is “a non-provable presupposition, something whose existence cannot be demonstrated but only inferred through the failure of its direct demonstration.” [454] In short, it can only be investigated at the level of mytho-poetics. But what intensifies the problematic of such a metaphysical archeology of the subject is that without such a mytho-poetic narrativization of its impossible Past we would be unable fully to explicate how the Symbolic can in fact relate to reality in itself, for without it we cannot perform the parallax shift of “transposing the tragic gap that separates the reflecting subject from pre-reflexive Being into this Being itself,” whereby “the problem becomes its own solution: it is our very division from absolute Being which unites us with it, since this division is immanent to Being.” [455] In other words, the real and the ideal sides of overcoming idealism are intimately connected and cannot be discussed in isolation from one another: in order for idealism to completely surmount its own apparent limitations, it must be able to come full circle and show how, from within realism, its own ambiguities are not merely epistemological but also ontological; it must show what it means for thinking to be a part of the world, a manner in which the world relates to itself, no matter how paradoxically.

In creating itself by an act of immaculate conception, the Real-as-origin of the pure act at the birth of full-fledged subjectivity retroactively takes over what we come to know as the Real-as-excess of the drives. In a contradictory moment in which cause-and-effect relations are torn apart, the effect becomes greater than and autonomous from its cause, even going so far as to write a virtual possibility into the eternal dregs of the Past that never existed prior to its having been written there through an act of positing of its own presuppositions. The subject creates its own past in the same instance in which it begets itself out of nothing, so that the true “arche-fossils” are not ancestral statements concerning what occurred billions of years ago before the emergence of the thinking subject or life itself, but the objectal status of the subject:

Because the objectal status of the subject escapes any straightforward causal explanation and lies outside of all correlation insofar as it is responsible for its very upsurge, the only way to reach it is by means of a mytho-poetics of speculative fabulation. And given that this realistically non-deducible and idealistically inaccessible zone coincides with that very place in which the subject is inscribed within being as one creature amongst others (and is thus that which would enable us to pass without any immanent obstacle from the real pole to the ideal pole and vice versa) the parallax shift from the negative limitation of knowledge to the positive structure of the absolute itself requires more than mere rational ideal discourse. Only then can we “relate the In-itself to the split in the subject,” [457] for “what Lacan calls the objet a, the subject's impossible-Real objectal counterpart, is precisely such an 'imagined' (fantasmatic, virtual) object which never positively existed in reality—it emerges through its loss, it is directly created as a fossil.” [458] In this sense, Žižek's philosophy is paradoxical precisely because it attempts to think the unthinkable, that is, the cogito ergo sum as “I am that impossible piece of the Real where I cannot think” [459] that uncannily corresponds to that space within which the meaningless Real contingently awakens and opens its eyes for the first time. In so doing, the metaphysical archaeology of the subject it offers endeavors to demonstrate that what the subject “loses” in order to become a subject coincides with what is excluded from reality so that reality can appear to itself, in such a way that the Real is thereby transformed from being a primordial being to which we have lost access due to its symbolization into something of which we cannot shake ourselves, no matter how hard we try, because through a mere formal reversal the gaze of the subject is seen to be the gaze of the world upon itself, the ambiguities and difficulties of the former being always already those of the latter: what we see is that “the narrative [we are telling] is not merely the subject coping with its division from Being, it is simultaneously the story Being is telling itself about itself,” so that realism and idealism are no longer in opposition, but stand in a self-sufficient totality inclusive of both as immanent to the life of substance. The system of being and thinking has closed upon itself in one final self-referential gesture.

In Žižek, we must narrativize the movement from being to thinking if we wish to reconcile the two and completely escape the speculative throes of correlationism, since at the level of content there is always a minimal “non-dialectizable” difference of one to the other (a division) that prevents such a move in purely rational discourse. But we must highlight the precise logical structure of this solution if we are to come to terms with the originality, daringness, and potential problems of Žižek's position. Given that the exact real event that instigates being's coming into appearance/thinking/phenomenalization is the primordial ontological trauma that is the subject as object, we must in a mytho-poetic register (the subject in its objectal status being forever elusive) show that this trauma is not a mere accidental, haphazard occurrence in the personal history of an individual subject, but rather reveals itself as a constitutive, yet disrupting part of a greater trauma within being itself. But this (Žižekian) dialectical reconciliation is not a complete sublation of the opposition between realism and idealism, a complete break with the paradoxes of correlation, for the problematic nature of the latter is something that must be accounted for rather than explained away. As with all dialectical movement, “reconciliation is a reconciliation with the irreducibility of the antinomy, and it is in this way that the antinomy loses its antagonistic character,” [460] so that in this case, reconciliation only truly occurs when we realize that there is no reconciliation (a complete solution) possible because what we take as our finitude should be inscribed into the thing itself (being) as its non-coincidence to self; and although this reconciliation can only thus come to pass at the level of mythological form, and never at that of content, instead of focusing on the impossibility of idealist representation to capture that which is being described, namely the objectal status of the subject, the solution paradoxically “shifts the focus to how (as Lacan put it) the signifier itself falls into the Real, that is, how the signifying intervention (narrativization) intervenes into the Real, how it brings about the resolution of a real antagonism,” [461] thus working against its own impossibility: “the narrative path directly renders the life of Being itself.” [462] Though we can never “exit the circle of imagination” [463] to capture the abyss of unconscious decision at its real origin, by writing being's poem we can see, due to a mytho-poetic parallax shift, that the poem we are writing coincides with the one that being is writing about itself. The human eye is never merely human: it is identical with the world itself “gaining” the power to see itself, so that our apparently purely epistemological limitations are intimately linked to the ontological grounding of our notional apparatus. But is such a mytho-poetic narrativization a sufficient basis for a new speculative philosophy? As we will see in the next chapter, delving into this question leads us to three potentially fatal issues with Žižek's critical metaphysics, all emerging from its fundamental concept of ontological catastrophe as the vanishing meditator between the Real and the Ideal. Does Žižek have the resources necessary to combat them? And if so, at what price?

12.1 The Schellingian Real-as-Excess: Iain Hamilton Grant, Naturphilosophie, and the Interior Involutions of Being

But is mytho-poetics the only option here? Although Žižek follows Hegel's defence of radical idealism as capable of a speculative account of extra-notional reality, a potentially fatal problem arises internally within Žižek's own position as soon as we take a closer look at Žižek's other major interlocutor: Schelling. Ultimately unsatisfied with Hegel's mature account of the passage from nature to culture, Žižek turns to Schelling to explicate the genesis of the Symbolic. What Hegel missed was the paradoxical essence of this very movement, a dialectical movement that causes dialectics to collapse upon itself. With the birth of subjectivity, we see a snag in substance that prevents the absolute from self-actualizing itself so that, instead of being the Idea completely returning to itself out of its otherness in nature, which would present us with a reconciliation of nature and spirit in the Idea, nature's complete self-sublation in spirit, culture is actually a mere secondary (“virtual, artificial, symbolic, not substantially natural” [464] ) response to the primordial ontological trauma that lies at the core of the human being. For Žižek, this means that culture is the always failed attempt at reconciliation: the Idea is nothing other than this very act of its own returning to itself, this movement being constitutive of that to which is returned; [465] for it to reach its end would herald its death. Representing a recoil into a psychotic, irreal space, not only do the subjective and objective/mind and world thereby fall into infinite conflict with one another, but it becomes impossible to explain why the Ideal emerges. According to Žižek it is Schelling who, fighting against the perceived threat of Hegelian Absolute Idealism, gives the most detailed account of this immanent self-sundering of being into its real and ideal poles in his account of the Grund as the ever elusive, eternal Past of consciousness, and the pure act of unconscious decision underlying the birth of the universe of human meaning. Schelling's position is paradoxical: from within a solipsistic space (transcendental idealism) he tries to develop a philosophical language capable not only of piercing the primacy of the Real-as-lack and explaining its monstrous pre-history within pre-symbolic antagonism (materialism), a logically prior but directly unreachable modality of the Real that precedes and exceeds the Symbolic, but also of describing the inexplicable self-positing of subjectivity (idealism). After all, even if we can be said to have access to both the ancestral past of the Real prior to subjectivity and the Real that surrounds us “outside” of language through the very inconsistency of our notional apparatus, the methodology of which Hegel offers us through an analysis of the dialectic of phenomenal appearance and the very structure of symbolic thought, nevertheless the precise moment in which the subject institutes itself into being poses a problem to such a self-overcoming of radical idealism, because it is a leaping point in the Real into a new age of the world that is always “beyond” the Symbolic as its irretrievable origin. Because Schelling realizes the impossibility of a purely speculative account of the subject's emergence, and thus the necessity of a mytho-poetics, it is he and not Hegel who most adequately realizes the quadruple logic of dialectics at the core of German Idealism.

But even with his highly methodological psychoanalytical construction of the unconscious Grundlogik of German Idealism, for anyone who is familiar with Schelling's vast corpus it is unclear how Žižek can appropriate Schelling for his own project without potentially destabilizing his most fundamental theoretical category: that of the ontological catastrophe. Although the two major concepts Žižek utilizes—denaturalized unruliness (the dark pre-history of subjectivity in the vicissitudes of being) and the unconscious decision (the separating Ent-Scheidung whose effect is the institution of a metaphysically disjunctive “and”)—are meant to explain how we get entrapped in the Symbolic and the matrix of idealization, Žižek's own writings on Schelling do not seem fully to take into account the possibility that the latter might not be able to be so easily translated into the framework that he sees as basic to the entire tradition. His division of Schelling's thinking into three distinct stages—the Schelling1 of a quasi-Spinozistic philosophy of absolute indifference, Schelling2 of a radical materialist ontology of freedom, and Schelling3 of the philosophy of mythology and revelation—already hints at an irremovable tension. It is uncertain that the materialism-idealism relationship we see in the Schelling of the Freiheitsschrift and the Weltalter can be read as a mytho-poetics of the birth of a radical transcendental idealism in the manner Žižek suggests. When we look at Schelling's thought, even as Žižek himself presents it, we are tempted to say that, if Hegel is able to show that the absolute opposition between idealist and realist philosophy is without meaning from within idealism, Schelling could be said to do the same from within realism and without needing to pass through the former. This is further supported by the fact that Schelling never gives us a dialectical analysis of phenomenal appearance or the structure of symbolic thought in the way Hegel does describes his own idealism in the Darstellung as “real” or “objective,” for its principal idea is not to use thought's inconsistencies to find a new starting point for speculative philosophy, but rather to directly investigate the origins of thought itself from its dark nonconscious ground, [466] a point repeated by the “higher realism” of the Freiheitsschrift [467] and the emergence of ideality in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen out of minerals. [468] The argument that Schelling2 is an ephemeral rupture risks succumbing to arbitrariness, since now we find a manner to unify the central problematic of the Naturphilosophie and the “theosophic” philosophy of freedom. Given that one of the key tools for the development of Žižek's own metaphysics is the extracting of an unconscious Grundlogik underlying German Idealism, if Schelling's philosophy turns out to be more continuous than Žižek's analysis lets on, then his psychoanalytical construction of the German Idealist tradition could be jeopardized.

For Schelling, we do not just “tarry with the negative.” The X that eludes consciousness, one of the centrepieces of Schelling's thought, is never just a mere formal limit: it is an attempt to express the subject-independent interiority of nature to which we have access despite the mediating activity of consciousness precisely because the subject and its ideational capacities are a part of nature, one way through which nature relates to itself as ground. Schelling refuses to separate the ontological in-itself of precognitive or extra-symbolic reality from the epistemological sphere of idealist representations, arguing that the two must be intimately connected if philosophy is to find a secure basis. If there is an identity between the Real and the Ideal, the problem of their relation to one another is relegated to a metaphysical or naturephilosophical level rather than a strictly epistemic or idealist one. Whereas in the middle-late period this idea of identity is expressed by the notion of the Mitwissenschaft (“co-science”) of creation, it is more clearly for our purposes articulated in the earlier Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, where Schelling argues for the necessity of a dialectically positive interactivity between mind and matter if transcendental idealism is to have a proper founding, which goes in the face of both the Hegelian proof of the insignificance of an opposition between idealistic and realistic philosophy and a Žižekian metaphysics of the disjunctive “and”:

It is exactly this problematic that reverberates throughout the entirety of Schelling's thinking, even when he attempts to outline the tension-ridden oscillations of the Yes and the No, the light and the dark principles, constitutive of the self-operative logic of the Grund. Rather than offering some kind of paradoxical eruptive logic balancing materialism and idealism through their infinite conflict, Schelling's philosophy can very easily be read as a passionate attempt to show that the forces underlying human spiritual-transcendental activity are nothing more than the already existent potencies of nature arisen to a higher “power” through nature's auto-development. If the starting point of Žižek's transcendental materialism is a self-grounding idealism (which shows his distinctive Lacanian-Hegelian presuppositions), Schelling's own transcendental materialism is a self-articulating realism (which shows how Schelling has been influenced by the evolutionary dynamism of natural scientists such as Kielmeyer), the stark point separating them being that whereas in the former materialism is always a spectral materialism developed in the cracks of idealism, in the latter idealism becomes, as it were, a mere conditioned phenomenon. In this strict sense, if Schelling's philosophy is an account of the self-unfolding of the powers of nature according to their inner movement, it is because it is a speculative realism understood in its original etymological meaning: deriving from the Latin speculari (to watch over), it is a realism that attempts to, through a scrutinizing surveillance, account for the immanent pulsations of the universe as it transforms bodies of matter into the complex field of living being and eventually thought as ideal self-mediation, so that the Real is not only always excessive to the Ideal, that which can never be brought into it due to nature's raw productivity, but the latter also loses its theoretical primacy insofar as nature in the stirrings of its nocturnal ground itself becomes the true a priori.

It is interesting to bring up this aspect of Schelling's philosophy, not just because it could be a weak point in Žižek's psychoanalytical reading, but also because it is a specific manner in which Žižek's metaphysical problematic enters into direct debate with the current speculative turn. In this regard, Iain Hamilton Grant's own transcendental materialism is in complete opposition to that of Žižek, so that contrasting the two allows us simultaneously to bring to the fore both the daring character of the latter's position and its potential internal limitations. Taking up Schelling's diagnosis that modern philosophy exhibits an agonizing deficiency—that nature does not exist for it [470] —Grant puts forward the argument that this diagnosis is just as sound today as ever: “[i]nsofar therefore as the antithetical couple ‘Plato-Kant’ that lay at the heart of the immediate postkantian context continues to organize metaphysics, contemporary philosophy is importantly and immediately postkantian.” [471] Through a careful reconstruction of Schelling's philosophical career with an eye towards its explicit naturephilosophical content and the natural scientific context that surrounded and inspired it, Grant's thesis is that by following its spirit, we may finally find a way to leave behind us the Kantian heritage insofar as Schelling offers us, instead of a two-world metaphysics that results in an “eliminative practicism” (the irreducibility of culture to nature), a “one-world physics capable of the Idea.” [472] We cannot cut the world in two, for there is no great divide: even to understand culture as culture, we have to understand its genesis from its ground within nature, for culture itself is originally natural. There is no absolute split between the Real and the Ideal, mind and matter, the dead movement of inanimate objects and the life of organic being—there are only the unconditioned, groundless powers of nature as a pulsating all that creates specific bodies and their various, innumerable, and unpredictable organizations according to its own cryptic inner process. According to Grant, Schelling's revolutionary thesis is that the only way we can explicate ideality is to see it as just one specific expression of nature's productivity, one among many possible products of nature as a priori. There is just a difference of degree and not of type between, say, atoms, chemicals, and free ethical subjects, insofar as there is a natural history of mind to which we must have recourse to explain its apparent autonomy. Far from being an idealism that grounds itself from within the infinite self-reflexivity of thinking “with no external support of its truth,” [473] Schelling's idealism is a naturephilosophical investigation into the interior involutions of being, the latter being equally inclusive of thought's transcendental activity as the somatic constitution of physical bodies. Nature is a dark dynamicity that brings philosophy far away from the practico-concrete sphere of an anthropocentric universe into the enigmatic palpating powers that gave birth to it in their antagonism and the forgotten aeons of the abyssal dregs of cosmic time that have preceded us. In this manner, Grant is taking Schelling literally at his word:

Although Grant and Žižek are reading Schelling in different, largely incommensurable ways—the former by a remarkable reconstruction of Schelling's naturephilosophical and scientific context, the other by a violent psychoanalytical overhauling of the entire German Idealist tradition—the fact that they both fall upon the same figure to elaborate their own materialist position is extraordinarily thought provoking. First and foremost, it suggests that the role of Schelling in Žižek's thinking poses a potential problem for the latter's own transcendental materialist ontology of the subject, and not merely for external reasons: it challenges the latter's very notion of a metaphysics of the disjunctive “and.” The great contribution of Schelling's Naturphilosophie was to enact a complete displacement of the human subject, for it imposes upon us the counterintuitive task of a geology of morals that fights against any complete separation of the human (the realm of free acting) from the natural (the realm of necessity). The stark implications of this, as Grant himself notes, were clearly perceived by Eschenmayer, a Fichtean natural scientist, who after reading the Freiheitsschrift fell into a paroxysm of horror due to its primary soul-wrenching implication: “your essay on human freedom seems to me a complete transformation of ethics into physics, a consumption of the free by the necessary, of feeling by understanding, of the moral by the natural, and above all a complete depotentiation of the higher into the lower order of things.” [475] Commenting on this passage, Grant writes:

In this respect, when Žižek claims that it is Schelling who gives the most detailed description of the ontogenesis of subjectivity in the philosophical tradition—which makes him the father of dialectical materialism and contemporary philosophies of finitude—he is in many ways completely justified, but in so doing he risks opening himself to the criticism that he misses how Schelling proceeds in this endeavour as well as its larger philosophical consequences, which presents two immediate major problems in his own usage of Schelling. First, if Grant is correct, Schelling rejects from the outset the very idea of a self-enclosed transcendental framework and its concomitant mind-body dualism, the ontological emergence of which is, according to Žižek, the fundamental philosophical obsession of the middle-late Schelling. If the unconscious Grundlogik of German Idealism is constituted by the dynamic of a self-grounding idealism and a spectral materialism grounded in the former, then Schelling's precise place within it would seem to be uncertain. Second, if Žižek's transcendental materialism assumes the birth of the I out of the not-I as an impossible event with no true precursor in the ancestral past of the pulsating fires of the heavens, the sluggishly slow evolution of geological formations, or even the forces of evolution in biological life-forms (none of its apparent brethren come close to its pure difference), in such a way that the self-positing of freedom literally cuts the absolute in two in an inexplicable manner, then we must conclude that Schelling's own metaphysics does not automatically result in a metaphysics wherein substance is split at its core, and thus ontological dislocation is the primordial fact. Contra Fichte, Schelling explicitly claims that there is a continuity between the I and the not-I, that the passage is one of a transition, not a leap. If psychoanalysis is to work in a therapeutic setting, an encounter with the Real can only truly be brought forth if all the intended meanings of the subject have been understood for what they are; otherwise a psychoanalytical interpretation does not work, because it does not hit the cause (which is why Lacanian analysts rarely offer interpretations). Moreover, even if we agree that Žižek is right to contend that the theosophical content of the middle-late Schelling is a mythological component that we can formalize in order to render its content more explicit (which Grant's work also implicitly does, given that he does not explicitly deal with the theological aspect of the Freiheitsschrift or the Weltalter), it is uncertain that he can so easily get rid of the naturephilosophical implications of these texts. But the stakes are much higher than those of the philological-textual fidelity of an interpretation in this case: if Schelling's philosophy presents a framework incompatible with the one Žižek sees in it and his own psychoanalytical reconstruction extensively relies upon this for its own argumentative vitality, Žižek's own development of a metaphysics of the Real by an engagement with Schelling is not only potentially misguided, but could also lose sight of various other resources explicit in Schelling that could be used to rethink the materialism-idealism relationship.

Elaborating on Grant's argument, we see that Schelling completely bypasses the problem of the materialism-idealism relationship because idealism is never a purely self-referential play. The whole concept of a “spectral” materialism just has no place here; speculative philosophy has a stricto sensu non-idealistic foundation. As Grant succinctly puts it, it what is at stake is the “impersonal coincidence of the transcendentally generated universal and self-generating nature [... and] Schelling’s hypothesis is, in other words, that there is a naturalistic or physicalist ground of philosophy,” [477] a ground that does not implicate an eliminative materialism wherein all is reduced to empirically observable bodies—somatism—but in such a way that genuine philosophy “consists in the dynamic elaboration of the identity of nature and Ideas.” [478] In this manner, if one reads Žižek's own transcendental materialism alongside that which Grant develops from his own reactualization of Schelling, one is presented with an alternative to Žižek's own metaphysics of the not-all, one not centred in the Ideal as being's irreconcilable self-division, but rather one based upon the fragile productivity of nature as it contingently and continually takes on new forms (and destroys others), a productivity that in no way has man as its summit, but will create new creatures (and monsters) without end because there is no stasis, but only a restless movement of the depths, a beautiful and macabre dance of great delicacy and improvisation whose actors simultaneously whimper and laugh under its weight. Lacanian psychoanalysis prohibits this Schellingian move because it would require that the chain of signification constitutive of human language be not based on an operationally closed system with no natural grounding, but could actually open up onto the world as it is in its own interior involutions because it would be, as it were, one with it. Although we philosophize about nature by “following a procedure of successive unconditioning performed by thought-operations about nature,” a process that allows us to “arrive at a conception of 'nature as subject,'” this investigation is never a mere reconstruction within the ideal series of the Real, but is rather a movement of the Real itself, for “such a philosophical system does not therefore seek a fixed point from which to gain leverage on an external world, nor to rise above it, but is itself a 'genetic' [...] movement in and on this world, unconditionally.” [479]

Schelling expresses this identity most daringly when he says that “to philosophize about nature means to create nature.” [480] “Mental” activity is always already a part of nature and therefore a part of its own auto-development by being one of its emergent attributes, but nature, being the truly and absolutely a priori, is unconditional and thereby guarantees that thought is never limited to the mere ideational or physiological constraints of conditioned particulars insofar as it is an expression of nature's productivity rather than embodied in the fixity of one of its products. In this way, for Schelling, we are primordially “connected” with nature as the pre-Symbolic, insofar as the Real and the Ideal remain identified at an essential level, the consequence being that the subject is not a dialectically non-sublatable in-between that exists as the psychotic withdrawal of the world into self. Accordingly, Žižek's reliance upon Schellingian ontology risks problematizing his own position, for if Žižek draws upon Schelling as a partner for the elaboration of the impossible genesis of the transcendental out of an orgasm of forces within the pre-symbolic Real, this immediately draws our attention to other possibilities of understanding the subject that do not present the latter as an irrevocable moment of ontological catastrophe in the flux of material being. This would force us to rethink the very nature of the psychoanalytical experience and the essence of the disjunctive “and” that is central to Žižek's own parallax ontology—and in this manner, not only does its theoretical first principle begin to tremble, but the very primacy of the Lacanian psychoanalysis that serves as its starting point is put into question. It is highly revelatory that to make use of Schelling for his project in the first place Žižek can only focus on two works (the Freiheitsschrift and the second draft of the Weltalter) because of their apparently disavowed Hegelian structure as that which would enable one to extract from them a self-operative logic establishing the primacy of the Real-as-lack through the abyss of unconscious decision.

We can begin to see why Žižek's proclamation that his project is Hegelian, but never Schellingian (despite the fact that the Freiheitsschrift and the Weltalter contain the most vivid description of the emergence of the Symbolic), is multilayered. First and foremost, Žižek takes radical idealism as the only true beginning for philosophy insofar as we can only interact with the world through the medium of thought, making correlationism basic to our experience. If the cracks within ideality epistemologically enable us to develop a spectral materialism, then the irreducibility of the Real-as-lack paradoxically does not prohibit us from having access to being as the Real-as-excess because this very concept thereby becomes internal to our notional apparatus. In this manner, Žižek is quite justified in saying that his project is Hegelian given that—on his own reading of Hegel at least—it strictly speaking shares this identical starting point and draws from it the exact same consequences, a move that in turn allows him to avoid the problem of expressing too strong a reliance on and debt to Schelling, which could potentially bring his own thinking uncomfortably close to everything he denies: the non-Freudian unconscious (in its Bergsonian, Jungian, Deleuzian, etc., forms), “pre-modern” cosmology, or Romantic theories of nature. Yet, this does not by any means solve the ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling relationship in his thinking, for as we have seen, what is crucial to Žižek's own reading of Schelling is that Schelling's own theoretico-epistemological framework, at least in the second period of his thinking, is unknown to itself the same as that of Hegel. Although Žižek has to do great violence to Schelling to extract a Hegelian dialectical structure of negativity in his texts, nevertheless the interpretation he presents is extremely internally consistent and methodologically sound. If the thoroughness of a position like Grant's is a challenge to Žižek, then Žižek's own reading of Schelling is equally a challenge to Grant's and other canonical and non-canonical interpretations that exist. The game goes both ways—and because the conceptual terrain within which both operate is vastly different, it is not evident how we are to decide upon the favourability of one interpretation over another. However, one has to underline that this oscillation between Schelling and Hegel is not so much an inconsistency or sleight-of-hand gesture on Žižek's part, the reason being that what interests him is less the specific differences between the historical thinkers of the tradition, but an unconscious truth that can be seen to deploy itself through them. Accordingly, not only is there absolutely no contradiction in saying that Žižek's philosophy is a hybridism of Hegelian logic and Schellingian ontology insofar as it is precisely this hybridism that can retroactively be seen to be the traumatic core at the formative heart of the tradition itself, but reflecting upon the intrinsic ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling relationship helps us reveal the originality and daringness of Žižek's critical metaphysics.

12.2 Anton-Babinski Syndrome: Slavoj Žižek's Paradoxical Overcoming of Idealism

Although Žižek's appropriation of Schelling could be perceived as highly problematic, insofar as the latter may not so easily fit into the proto-structuralist framework Žižek sees as operative in German Idealism, another problem immediately arises that potentially hits the core of his overcoming of radical idealism. Even if we accept the legitimacy of his reading of Schelling, it is unlikely that Žižek's own Hegelian attempt to show the insignificance of any absolute opposition between idealist and realist philosophies from within idealism would satisfy a realist. If we never leave the clutches of idealism, then any knowledge that we possess would never be able to reach the absolute in its pure non-correlationality to the subject. We are always entrapped in the masturbatory play of signifiers in their incessant sliding. Moreover, the Real-as-excess as what precedes and exceeds consciousness is an explicitly impossible concept. Even Žižek's “materialist” response to idealism has as its fundamental task to bring to the fore this intrinsic impossibility: remodulating the Schellingian act of unconscious decision, its seeks to show how the shift from the Real-as-excess (pre-symbolic antagonism) to the Real-as-lack (symbolic imprisonment) is the ultimate ontological parallax by a speculative fabulation of the always lost and inaccessible moment of the auto-disruption of the noumenal realm. At its best, the realist metaphysics appears to be reduced to mythology.

Žižek's overcoming of idealism articulates itself in two distinct moments. First, since the Real-as-lack is the logical zero-level of any philosophy due to the insurmountability of the Symbolic, to arrive at some kind of knowledge of an “extra-”notional zone of experience (the Real-as-excess) would appear a priori foreclosed. However, the very inconsistency of our notional apparatus allows us to develop knowledge of reality in itself, for as soon as we “apply” a category to the world and it shows itself as inadequate, we see that the field of appearing is always more than appearance, whereby the noumenal now appears as the self-limitation of the phenomenal. Our experience of the world is not a full-blown hallucination: we can use these experiences of breakdown to our advantage in order to explore a world that only seems to be infinitely “beyond” our reach. The Real-as-excess becomes an intra-discursive category, so that epistemic limitations of knowledge negatively demonstrate our inclusion into and thus capacity of understanding the world at large, rather than our imprisonment in a socially constructed universe of discourse. It is precisely because of this that Žižek says that “the true problem is not how to reach the Real when we are confined to the interplay of the (inconsistent) multitude of appearances, but, more radically, the properly Hegelian one: how does appearance itself emerge from the interplay of the Real?” [481] Second, given that we are in some sense a part of the absolute, our failure to reach it has to coincide with a failure of the absolute itself. Žižek's wager is that if we do fail in reaching the absolute in thought, this cannot be due merely to the finitude of our notional apparatus: “[i]f we can think our knowledge of reality (i.e., the way reality appears to us) as radically failed, as radically different from the Absolute, then this gap (between the for-us and the in-itself) must be part of the Absolute itself, so that the very feature that seemed forever to keep us away from the Absolute is the only feature which directly unites us with the Absolute.” [482] The point is not to “'overcome' the gap [...] but to take note of how this gap is internal to [the Absolute]”: [483] arguing that our inability to overcome our entrapment in the Symbolic and find our place within being is already the very lost object we are looking for, Žižek turns epistemological limit into positive ontological condition by inscribing the limitation of knowledge into the world as an event immanent in the latter: that is, by making it an (auto-) limitation of the absolute itself. If idealism is some form of ontological solipsism, then it must be revelatory of a zone wherein the absolute is irrevocably non-coincident to itself. In another vein, this means that any radically self-grounding idealism is always already a materialism, the two being nothing more than supplementary views on the same underlying reality; moving from one to the other just requires a certain switch of perspectives, a parallax shift, whose very possibility we can only explain by making the very irreconcilable split between idealism and materialism the imperceptible truth of both. Žižek's name for that which can strangely mediate between them because it is neither idealistic nor materialistic yet is included in both as excluded (“include me out!”) is the subject as an insurmountable ontological and symbolic lacuna. Consequently, the Symbolic is always already more than itself because it points to its dark origins in being's passage through madness—and even if the precise moment in which the world withdraws into its nocturnal, irreal self is forever lost in the universe of meaning it brings forth, we are nevertheless justified in mytho-poetically fabulating the act of decision that induces our collective psychosis, because the Symbolic can never do away with its origins.

Although the undecidable ambiguity of the Real is a problem Žižek inherits from Lacan, a problem similar to that faced by many forms of idealism, Žižek throughout his writings remains true to his great master's attempt to desubstantialize the Real, but with an important twist, a twist that accentuates the theoretical challenge of his critical metaphysics. What most clearly distinguishes Žižek's project from that of Lacan is his refusal to take our lack of access to the Real as a brute fact and his subsequent endeavour to inscribe it within being. The question arises, however, of whether Žižek's account of this emergent ontological parallax is even philosophically possible, given his epistemological commitments. Since phenomenal reality emerges only after being has sundered itself, whereby our access to the Real must be mediated by transcendental constitution, Žižek's double claim that the internal inconsistency of idealism is that which allows us to overcome it from within and that our inability to reach the thing itself is already that which we are looking for poses two important difficulties to his project that, for many, may not be adequately resolved or seem outright problematic. On the one hand, to switch epistemological limit into positive ontological condition by a mere parallax shift of perspective appears in many ways to be a mere sleight-of-hand argument. Given that this precise moment where our division from the absolute coincides with the self-division of the absolute (so that the story we are telling about being is simultaneously the story that being is telling to itself) can only be narrativized at the level of mytho-poetics, which reconciles substance and subject at the level of form and never at the level of content, it is unclear that the claim that the problem its own solution does the argumentative work it purports to do. To put it bluntly, since this precise moment defies any proper speculative explanation, it merely covers up the underlying issue that we are facing: that is, how we could have access to being in the first place. On the other, it is unclear that we can really collapse the distinction between realism and idealism by making the very distinction itself intra-conceptual or intra-discursive insofar as this move fails to sufficiently provide the conditions under which we could develop a truly speculative account of reality in itself that is not always already entrapped within the ambiguities of symbolization. In both cases, a realist would be quick to argue that we have done everything but leave the correlationalist circle, that we are stuck in a constituted world for us. For the former, it could not be said that we have some kind of “access” to reality through the immanent obstructions of the Symbolic as that which indicates the spectral presence of an extra-notional reality posited from within it, for the Real is a mere effect of the Symbolic. Does this go far enough in establishing the groundwork for a new metaphysics?

If we call the Real an internal limit or limitation of the Symbolic, we must be careful, because the Real is not so much a limit in the sense of a border that separates two distinct yet commensurable terrains, or a limitation in the sense of a restricting condition coming from an exterior force that one ought to overcome. Rather, the adjective “internal” is of utmost importance here because it stresses that the Real is completely immanent to the Symbolic's very idealizing activity in such a way that there is no outside except an outside that is paradoxically posited as inside. If the Symbolic functions within a psychotic withdrawal from the world, not only does it freely (re)constitute reality according to an autonomous, self-referential play or ciphering, but any obstruction that occurs within it would only be due to its freedom. In its first guise, the Real is nothing other than “a purely formal parallax gap or impossibility,” “the rupture or gap which makes the order of discourses always and constitutively inconsistent and non-totalizable,” [484] so that even if we are permitted to call this negative encounter with the Real a “positive running up against” the exterior world that operates as if it “touches the Real,” [485] in the same breath we must qualify this statement insofar as this can only be brought forth in the aftermath of symbolic distortion, that is, après-coup. This recognition of an indirect confrontation with a constitutive outside internal to the Symbolic is in itself just another symbolization: any “materialism” that could be developed by means of it will always already be entrapped within its ambiguities, so that this “materialism” is nothing but a mere retroactive adjustment of ideality to accommodate for its internal inconsistencies, for it is only from within the Symbolic that we see the Real as the residue of a failed attempt to synthesize an “extra”-notional reality. As Adrian Johnston puts it:

But “...indirectly shines through...” is a misleading metaphor: nothing breaks through the prison of language. As Žižek says, “we do not touch the Real by way of breaking out of the prison of language and gaining access to the external transcendent referent [...]. We touch the Real-in-itself in our very failure to touch it.” [487] This is what Žižek emphasizes when he posits an ontological passage through madness at the beginning of the Symbolic, for once it has occurred there is no contact with the world that is possible. If we take Lacan and Žižek at their word, we can never truly liberate ourselves from the psychotically self-sustaining construction of reality that is the Symbolic's autonomous idealization. Even if the latter does not equate to an omnipotent, non-limited hallucination of our world of experience—a Godlike primary process—nevertheless there is no escape from our collective hallucination of reality: impenetrable in its density, omnipresent in its extension, nothing is left untouched by this tenebrous realm of transcendental phantasmagoria within which we live and breathe as speaking subjects. The light of being is unable to radiate through the holes of the all-encompassing web of the Symbolic.

Here the case of Anton-Babinski syndrome should be evoked as a possible skeptical argument against Žižek's overcoming of radical idealism. A rare medical phenomenon, the syndrome is a symptom of brain damage (usually from a stroke) in the occipital lobe. What is so peculiar is that people who suffer from it, although cortically blind, claim that they can see. In their speech and general behaviour there is often, at first, no sign of blindness—family members and the medical team typically only begin to notice something is amiss when the patient begins to stumble into various physical objects in their path, whether it be tripping over a coffee table in front of him, walking into a wall, or describing things that are not really there. Not only do patients continue to refuse to admit their blindness despite all the inexorable obstructions in the all-out hallucination of their own visible field of experience, but, more primordially, it is clear that no amount of tarrying with the negative offered by the latter's internal short-circuiting would ever enable them to develop a “spectral” vision of the world in itself of which they have been deprived through organic devastation. To deal with the incomprehensible agony caused by such constant disturbances in their psychotically self-sufficient and imagined perception of subjective reality, those who suffer from Anton-Babinski syndrome actually find ways of giving support to its free generation by falsifying their memories, a process that in the medical community is called confabulation. In other words, even if a patient, realizing their condition, were to think that they are actually in the process of developing a sound mental map of the physical universe that is around them through the aid of their mishaps as a means of retroactively readjusting their imaginary field, and this not only with the hope of learning to navigate within it, but also to overcome their blindness by making the absolute opposition between a hallucinated world produced in the void of blindness and a vision of objective reality caused by retina input without meaning within their hallucination, it must be concluded that they could never assure themselves that this “spectral” seeing captures the world nor whether it is not just another hallucination that has been produced to save themselves from the psychological trauma of their own blindness. Lost in visual madness, they can never indirectly see the world shine through the inconsistencies of their hallucination.

But isn't this precisely the same situation we find ourselves in with respect to Žižek's attempt to break the correlationalist circle? The only possibility for an ontological grounding of the psychoanalytico-Cartesian subject being a phantom-like vision of the world building itself within the internal obstructions of the Symbolic's ciphering of the world, it would seem that just as it is impossible for those suffering from Anton-Babinski syndrome to spectrally construct a vision of the world that has been lost to them due to their lack of sight, so it is impossible that one could achieve some kind of paradoxical coincidence of the subjective and the objective capable of positive truth from within the nocturnal night of the world. If the self-overcoming of radical idealism proves insufficient to ground a new speculative philosophy, then the only alternative left is a pure mytho-poetic fabulation of the obscure origins of the Symbolic, the latter's ontological solipsism always already pointing beyond itself to an inaccessible material event that haunts it but that remains forever inaccessible. Unable to sublate the opposition of realism and idealism from within idealism, we could still, by writing being's poem, provide a mythological account of how our division from being is the same as being's division to itself, thereby hinting towards how this opposition is always already reconciled from within realism, making the problem itself moot: we must tell a story that inscribes our failure to reach the absolute in the absolute itself, so that which appears to keep us from the absolute is in actuality the only thing that ties us to it. Our madness is being's own. But if such a medium of expression presents itself as the rational necessity of a non-rational discourse to explain discourse as such, then just as those suffering from Anton-Babinski syndrome create false memories to guarantee the consistency of their self-sufficient hallucination, so too does all speculative fabulation risk always being nothing more than a confabulation. What complicates this philosophical issue is the fact that in all mytho-poetic narratives where the very “origins” of the Symbolic in the Real are at stake, the event in question that institutes the movement from one to the other “never effectively took place within temporal reality, [although] one has to presuppose it hypothetically in order to account for the consistency of the temporal process.” [488] The result is that the event of the decision that violently separates Grund from existence potentially never occurred: it could be nothing but a fantasmatic, retroactive posit necessary for the internal consistency of our universe of meaning, so that the distinction between philosophy and fantasy/defence mechanism risks being blurred. As a consequence, Žižek's Schellingian “obscurantist idealist” manner of “deducing” this act from the pre-Symbolic could only be true insofar as it gestures towards the fundamental horror underlying subjectivity, just as the empirically false memories unearthed by those with false memory syndrome (being seduced, child sexual abuse) often merely reveal an underlying deadlock haunting a patient (that there is no sexual relationship). In this regard, not only is it unclear how we could truly test one mytho-poetic fabulation against another so as to guarantee their scientificity, but whether they have any metaphysical or ontological merit as such.

Given that our freedom means that we are forever stuck within a constitutive psychosis, the withdrawal of the world into the eternal darkness of its irreal self, the very category of truth here has been so starkly modified that Žižek's own philosophy risks undercutting the very ground it seeks. The subject is reduced to a mere spinning in the void of freedom, a void whose very emergence appears to render itself inexplicable and problematize any knowledge of the “outside” world. A realist will not only always find the reduction of the thought/being opposition to an intra-conceptual distinction an insufficient basis for a positive knowledge of the ontological and its vicissitudes, but will also reject myth as a speculative science insofar as correlationism has been preserved rather than overcome, for without the prior self-overcoming of idealism, the best mytho-poetics can do in the framework of a radical subjective idealism is to reconcile substance and subject at the level of mere mythological form rather than that of content. If idealism is co-incident with an ontological passage through madness, how could we develop a form of linguistic thinking able to overcome the psychotic withdrawal from objective reality that appears to be its very meta-transcendental condition of possibility to describe its event in being?

12.3 Fichte's Laughter, Henri Maldiney, and the Necessity of a “Successful” Psychotic Thinking

Spinning in the void of freedom—isn't this the Fichtean position? Does Žižek truly succeed in overcoming the theoretical impossibility forced upon us by the pure I and develop what Fichte thought was contrary to reason: namely, a transcendental materialist account of its emergence out of the not-I? Or is it not Fichte who, by refusing to fall upon the speculative potential opened up by the Anstoß and sticking to the internal dynamics of subjectification, ultimately has the last laugh in the history of post-Kantianism as a paradoxical attempt to develop a new metaphysics in the wake of idealism? Could he have uncannily predicted this dilemma? Perhaps it is in this precise sense that we should read Fichte's incomprehension of his critics, an incomprehension designed not so much to show his disgust at the childish laughter of established scholars at the apparent absurdity of his position (“Fichte, do you really think that air and light are a priori transcendental conditions of human freedom?”) as to directly express by public ridicule his own laughter at the absurdity of their position (“Established scholars, you really think you can break free of correlationism and develop a speculative philosophy?”):

For Fichte, true madness is not the psychotic withdrawal at the founding gesture of subjectivity, but rather rejecting its implications—in short, acting as if it never happened. If the ontological solipsism of the Ideal reduces all reality to a mere image, so that all “is transformed into a fabulous dream, without there being any life the dream is about, without there being a mind which dreams; a dream which hangs together in a dream of itself,” [490] rather than bemoaning the loss of being, we should realize the implications of this inexplicable leap into freedom, that is, that the phenomenal world “absolutely creates itself [...] in a genesis out of nothing.” [491]

Just like the Fichtean transcendental Wissenschaftslehrer is able to come to the realization that life as we know it is nothing but a void doubled in on itself, a dream of a dream, so too the Žižekian transcendental materialist is able from within the throes of originary psychosis to see this psychosis for what it is. But he does not stop there. While the Wissenschaftslehrer proclaims that the only thing left for us to do is to actively create, through the infinity of imagination, the groundless images necessary to fully actualize our freedom in concrete striving, the transcendental materialist pauses for a moment at this insight: if we can see that our life is a dream of a dream, if we can understand psychosis as psychotic, then there must be a minimal level of distance possible, as it were, between us and the transcendental (re)constitution of reality as a collective hallucination—and it is precisely this distance that enables us to thematize the entire process for what it is both in terms of the internal dynamics of subjectification and its wider inscription within being. In short, the theoretical gesture at the heart of Žižek's project is the following: if we can recognize our symbolic entrapment as entrapment, then our idealist psychosis is not only non-coincident with itself, but must in certain instances be “unable” to fully lock us within its cage. The very reason why we even know that there is a free transcendental constructionism fabricating our world of experience in the first place is that this constructionism fails and is unable to absolutely create itself: radical idealism fails to be radical idealism because it is haunted by seemingly non-ideal constraints, so that in this immanent failure it opens up the space for a new form of materialism insofar as it demonstrates that the Symbolic is always already minimally outside itself. In this sense, the Real-as-lack, as that which was apparently at the very root of the realist objection to being able to overcome correlationism from within idealism, is of irreducible importance since it enables us to enact a metaphysical archaeology of the subject, and thus mytho-poetically fabulate a picture of its emergence from a pre-symbolic antagonism that sets the stage for the free idealization of the world. For otherwise, we cannot explicate how we can see psychosis as psychotic in the first place. It is the only possible Archimedean point from which we could be saved from confabulation by a constant tarrying with its traumatic piercing. Yet a speculative fabulation is merely that—a fabulation: recognizing the limits of rational inquiry for describing the exact moment of withdrawal into self at the commencement of the universe of meaning, it supplements it with a mythology that is consciously aware of the intrinsic inaccessibility of its object. Even if such a medium is justified by means of the Symbolic's own failure, which shows itself in a parallax shift of perspective as a disruptive ontological occurrence, we must concede that the actual narrative cannot truly articulate the miraculous advent of subjectivity in the Real. By delving into the impossible, the best it gives us is a sideways glance into the always absent origin.

The scientific legitimacy of mytho-poetics relies, for its theoretical force, largely on Žižek's solution to the realism-idealism debate from within idealism. To embark upon a mythologico-metaphysical archeology of the subject is to try to come to terms with the unfathomable zone in between the pure Real and the Symbolic that lies paradoxically in both and neither. But to describe the passage from one to the other is stricto sensu impossible because such a passage that can be nothing other than an unpredictable event that arises ex nihilo within the Real itself and which simultaneously is always already withdrawn from the very logical space that could rationally investigate it. But to see this as an impossibility in the Real (“the leaping point”) and not just of the Symbolic (its “origin” in unconscious decision) presupposes that the question has changed from how we can gain access to the Real through the Symbolic to the ambiguous genesis of the latter out of the former. But has Žižek given us an adequate foothold from within which we can escape correlationism and answer this? Henri Maldiney, a little known French phenomenologist who rethinks human transcendence through the experience of psychosis, can give us some useful if controversial resources to draw out the intrinsically paradoxical nature of this inquiry.

Discussing the introduction to Ludwig Binswanger's case studies on schizophrenia, [492] Maldiney outlines a peculiarity in the former's phenomenological method. Rejecting the possibility of understanding schizophrenia directly, either through positivistic methodology or an immediate experience (what the person says being inadequate to express their illness), one has, as Biswanger notes, to “let oneself be carried by the very nature of things,” that is, presuppose an inner, self-articulating structuration of the phenomenon that will reveal itself through a careful description as that which lets its phenomenological essence mediate itself to us. In this sense, there is a distinction to be made between (the) phenomenal experience (of schizophrenia) and (the) phenomenological experience (of schizophrenia as the object of a science). But this presupposition is, in fact, a Hegelian presupposition: “let oneself be carried by the very nature of things” is a literal repetition of the definition of science in the Preface of The Phenomenology of Spirit, where it is said that, in the dialectical method, we must let ourselves sink into the content at hand, thereby “letting it move spontaneously of its own nature.” [493] We must always presuppose an interior life of the object whose essence will then be freely and spiritually internalized/mediated/idealized by the concept. Even if this presupposition appears harmless, it has a strange consequence in this context because of the specific object under investigation by the phenomenologist: “[i]t is not enough to bear witness to the incompatibility between science and psychosis. For their very incompatibility here is due to an extremely close proximity,” for given that the phenomenological aims to be the (self-)thematization of the phenomenal, their very distinction risks dissipating into nothing as a certain undecidability emerges. [494] The task of the phenomenological science of psychosis is to let psychosis live in its fullness, to show its true meaning.

It is this methodological ambiguity that in turn enables Maldiney to reap a wealth of resources from the experience of psychosis. For Maldiney, the similarity that Hegel's dialectical method in The Phenomenology of Spirit bears to Binswanger's phenomenological approach to schizophrenia and thus, by implication, to his own to psychosis is not just limited to how they define their way of proceeding. Rather, it can also be seen at the very level of the investigation of their objects, so that there exists an extremely close proximity between the two levels of investigation that is constantly in danger of conflating them, but with an important twist. In the case of a phenomenology of psychosis, by letting psychosis speak the fullness of its essence by letting oneself be carried away by the in-dwelling logic underlying its phenomenality, what is at stake is not merely to understand how a psychotic crisis is a singular event responsible for the existential demise of an individual, but more primordially how this demise is revelatory of a failed transcendence and thus continues to participate in the very ambiguity and enigma at the heart of transcendence itself, even if in an out-of-joint manner, for “[i]ts dramatic testifies (pathei mathos) to that which is irreducible in man.” [495] If this is the case, then we can question psychosis in order to bring to the fore the various existentialia operative in the very process of subjectification and temporalization central to human existence: “[w]hether his illness [maladie] is organic or vesanic, for man it is first of all a human trail; and it is only possible to understand the latter if one first of all knows what it means 'to be man.'” [496] In this sense, the experience of psychosis as a failed transcendence is beneficial for coming to terms with what a successful transcendence would be, by opening up the room for its (self-)thematization. In other words, if there is a certain ambiguity between the phenomenal (psychosis) and the phenomenological (its scientific essence) in this case, it is because the latter shows us that the former is always a possibility for us, an intimate potential of being human, so that the advent of the Real (in the sense of Maldiney) at the core of the subject is indifferent to the success or failure of the latter.

The Phenomenology, however, does not present us with a failed transcendence whose very failure highlights irreducible features of the drama of existence, as in Biswanger's case studies or Maldiney's own work on psychosis. But neither does it present us with a straightforwardly successful transcendence (if such a thing even exists) for the movement of consciousness it depicts is identical to the fundamental structure of depression, so that the question itself emerges as to how the Phenomenology can even arrive at dynamic unity and stability if the consciousness it describes is intrinsically depressive in nature:

For Maldiney, the primordial lost object that the Phenomenology searches for is “in reality existence” itself: [498] that is, human transcendence as a capacity of welcoming the completely unexpected and utterly new as revealed to us in the very flesh of sensation wherein subject and object are constituted after the fact by means of a single movement in the flux of a pure appearing that knows no bounds and no a priori. Maldiney relates this not only to the originary impression (ursprüngliche Empfindung) that Hölderlin identifies at the origin of his poetry, a primordial experience that demands a complete transformation—an asubjective becoming-other—wherein the world emerges at each moment as something never seen before, [499] but also to the pure present that is the true place within which subjectification and temporalization take place. [500] As a result, the key to understanding transcendence is not ideational-conceptual mediation (the gnosologic: the encyclopedia, the systematic), but rather sensibility (the pathic: the eruption of the unpredictable, being held out into the Open), which leads Maldiney to claim that the present is ecstatic—not in the sense analyzed by Hegel, but as an event that is “an outpouring, a gushing, of the new. All of this is just to name the ORIGINARY. It is the originarity of the present which founds at each moment the reality of time; and it is its novelty that renders time irreversible.” [501] Because Hegel's critique of sense certainty excludes any access to this primordial self-giving outside of the conceptual mediation, it is as if the very source of all unity and stability had been obstructed. The paradox is that, although consciousness has lost its primordial object, which should lead to psychopathology, “the Hegelian Aufhebung reproduces—in its own register—the transcendence of existence; but it can only reproduce it (in terms of a substitute of an Ersatz)—and this is the decisive characteristic—because existence has already been lost.” [502] It is in this manner that the Phenomenology exhibits a contradictory existential form of “successful” depressive thinking.

The problem is only intensified when one takes into account the methodological ambiguity Maldiney emphasizes in any phenomenology of psychosis between the phenomenal and the phenomenological, insofar as in the Phenomenology this ambiguity is expanded from the distinction between the phenomenal and the phenomenological to the distinction between the phenomenal and phenomenological and the investigator within which this distinction is enacted, so that the in-dwelling phenomenological essence of the phenomenality they investigate can be brought forth. Since the phenomenal here is conscious experience in its depressive existence, the investigator, by assuming the phenomenological attitude, is performing an ideal reconstruction of his or her own consciousness with said structure (which is simultaneously a self-construction of a depressive consciousness within the concept) into a scientific knowledge that is the system of experience. In this sense, the phenomenological level cannot be isolated from the phenomenal any more than it can in the phenomenology of psychosis, but now with an important precision to be made: the phenomenal experience is here the direct self-experience of the consciousness that goes through the odyssey that is the Phenomenology, but in such a way that it is as if phenomenal experience becomes phenomenological to itself, thematizes itself, in an act of gaining distance from itself, for the investigator who is exploring what it means to be a depressive consciousness is implicated in the very process. In short, there is ultimately no distinction between us and the object of investigation, because we are participating in the very thing that we are investigating. Accordingly, if the Phenomenology reveals that the fundamental structure of consciousness is a depressive structure, for those who embark upon it it is simultaneously a transformation of the mode of existing in transcendence that is depression into a unique style of living, wherein the same structure we see in the psychopathological state of depression is made into that which bestows upon consciousness a profound and never-ending source of energy while resting all the while depressive. If the phenomenology of psychosis brings to the fore various existentialia operative in the very process of subjectification and temporalization so that we see a successful transcendence in its contours, the Phenomenology offers a therapeutic realization of a similar kind of vitality that the latter provides, but within its very failure. To say that the Phenomenology is a form of successful depressive thinking is thus to say that it has apparently immanently overcome depression without ever leaving its clutches on existence by encountering the crisis head-on and coming out strong.

Consequently, we see three structural levels of depression in Hegel's Phenomenology: the basal depressive structure of consciousness—the loss of the primordial object—which is the zero-level of transcendence as such (originary depression or depression₀, failed transcendence); the psychopathological response that brings a particular person to an existential standstill, which we see in psychiatry (clinical depression or depression₁); and lastly the dialectical system of experience that, although depressive, is somehow successfully so, since even if its trial insists in experience it becomes a positive basis for a newfound energy and dynamism rather than a catalyst for decay (a form of successful depressive thinking, which is not a successful depression and is different in nature from depression₁). Following a suggestion taken up by Jean-Christophe Goddard, we can expand the idea as follows: it is not merely that the Phenomenology is a paradoxical form of successful depressive thinking, but more radically, it sketches a form of successful psychotic thinking in general. [503] Insofar as the event to which we are exposed by being held out into the Open in the pathos of sensation is the utterly new and unpredictable of which we can say nothing in advance, to give oneself over to it in its pure self-outpouring must itself be a form of originary psychosis, so that we see two possible responses: either from within an originary psychosis inflicting human transcendence as such we learn to be successfully psychotic or we opt for a path that would end in a pathological response to this primordial experience at the core of our being by levelling out its trauma instead of using it as the ground for the very impetus of one's subjective life in the world (a capacity Maldiney refers to as transpassibility).

Just as Hegel's Phenomenology could be described as an attempt to develop a form of successful depressive thinking, so too it could be ventured that Žižek's transcendental materialism may be an attempt to develop a form of successful psychotic thinking, but psychosis taken here not in Maldiney's unique understanding of it, but in the technical definition that Žižek instills it with as the world's withdrawal into its nocturnal self. Taking as its object the thematization of the inner structure of psychosis, which, since “madness signals the unconstrained explosion at the very core of human being,” [504] can only be done in and through psychosis, it seeks to use psychosis to pierce through its own impenetrable dusk by letting it move spontaneously of its own nature, that is, by reconstructing it ideally and scientifically in the concept through a mytho-poetic medium. But if the entirety of the Symbolic is some kind of virtual recompensation for this loss of objective reality, then this originary psychosis, essential to what it is to be a subject, must be primordially repressed if it is to be successful. We must forget that the very fabric of culture is nothing but the deluded ravings of the asylum, since otherwise we are confronted with the very monstrosity—ontological catastrophe, the passage of being through madness—that it was meant to cover up. This is precisely why the psychoanalytical experience is of irreducible importance for Žižek, for we could only hope to get beyond the various defence mechanisms underlying the constitution of our fantasmatic reality and catch a glimpse of their abyssal origin if this reality were wrought with piercing holes: if in our everyday lives we are completely lost in the transcendentally hallucinated world fabricated by the Symbolic, then only the upsurge of the Real as indicative of the infinite disharmony between mind and body can enable us to gain the necessary distance towards our self-loss in psychosis and thereby render possible its free (albeit mythological) internalization within the concept. But the Real not only opens up the space necessary for speculative fabulation as a faculty for explicating how we got “trapped” in ontological solipsism; it also lets us find a way, from within our constitutive psychosis, to minimally overcome this very entrapment. As that which is irreducible to the autonomous construction of the world of experience, the Real creates a realist moment within idealism itself. With these two elements achieved, we could be said to have developed a form of successful psychotic thinking: that is to say, a thinking that, from within its own psychosis, would not be limited by the latter in the same way that a form of successful depressive thinking would not be limited by its depression and would have gained a vitality similar to successful transcendence, despite its remaining depressive in structure.

A successful psychotic thinking—such an expression is intrinsically ambiguous and reveals the insurmountable difficulty any radical idealism has to overcome its own limitations. If our starting point is a self-grounding subjective idealism, we can never truly get “behind” it from within the universe of ideality, even if this idealism is wrought with fracture lines, inner tension, and agonizing cracks, for its symbolic (re)constitution of reality functions with no need of an “external support of its truth.” [505] Instead of representing that by which the light of being sneaks in despite the correlationalist prison, these can only indicate a torsion, an immanent implosion, from within ideal self-enclosure. By thematizing these places of non-coincidence we can perhaps come to terms with our entrapment and see it for what it is (namely, an entrapment). Yet it is not clear we can hope for much more if these skeptical reflections hold true: a successful psychotic thinking does not result in any strict overcoming of the epistemological constraints psychosis imposes upon us; it is only from within the Symbolic that we see the Real as the residue of a failed attempt of synthesis, thereby rendering it always already minimally symbolized, idealized, always already necessarily lost, there being nothing but the Symbolic and its self-referential play. The paradoxical overlapping of the purely subjective and the purely objective is precisely that: paradoxical. It does not allow for any encounter of the pure Real within the Symbolic, but is rather cognizant of the fact that, since the Real is an impossible concept, any attempt to describe its extra-notional character must be done from within its clutches. Knowledge of reality in itself becomes reduced to a retroactive readjustment of the Symbolic. We see this most clearly in the very expression itself. If a successful psychotic thinking is not a successful psychosis (a cure) but still exhibits the fundamental structure of psychosis, just as a successful depressive thinking in no way means that depression has been left behind and is always searching for the lost object, what we have attained would be at best the upper limit of the dialectic of appearance as such, which has finally collapsed upon itself in one great final cry giving voice to a contradictory combination of absolute power and utmost impotence. In recognizing the very limit of ideal synthesis, even if we are in a certain sense minimally beyond it (the “realist” moment) we can only admit the limit as an impasse with no beyond or content (even the “real” moment is completely determined by the throes of idealist entrapment). But is this sufficient to establish a new metaphysics? To speak metaphorically, it is as if, on Žižek's account, in radical idealism we see the four walls that surround us as a barrier not due to some window to the outside by which we know this site as the prison that it is (the ontological solipsism of the constitutive psychosis of the Symbolic) and could envisage an escape, but rather due to their very shaking we feel that we are incarcerated in an infinitely claustrophobic space from which we will never emancipate ourselves. From the cracks in the wall there may seep through faint, trembling voices, but in the painstaking process of reconstructing their mumbled words they risk becoming identical with those voices that we hallucinate in our solitude. And even if we succeed at spectrally envisioning this outside by a careful translation of their garbled noise into structured speech, could we be said finally to have liberated ourselves by making the very distinction between liberty and imprisonment void?

If a successful form of psychotic thinking is an intrinsically paradoxical concept, it is perhaps because radical idealism is itself intrinsically paradoxical. To say that we can never reach reality, that we are forever stuck within the human universe of meaning, is not merely problematic to ordinary natural and scientific consciousness because it goes against our basic intuitions, but in a more primordially discomforting way: for it proclaims an originary withdrawal from objective reality at the very foundation of what it is to be human, thus potentially reducing the world of experience to the rampant free play of phantasmagoria. For someone who adheres to such a radical idealism, it would appear that even if the inconsistency of our notional apparatus may always be insufficient for a realist to overcome the ambiguity of a successful psychotic thinking, and thus to find resources to establish a strong realism from within idealism itself, we can still embark upon a speculative fabulation of ontological catastrophe as the necessary condition of the possibility of the subject. For we must nevertheless be able to explicate the fact that we can see our life as a dream of a dream, our ontological psychosis as psychotic, for the Symbolic fails to posit itself as all, and must therefore be always already minimally outside itself. Just as Schelling declares that many things take place before the beginning proper, so Žižek contends that a lot happens in the indemonstrable Real-as-origin haunting the Symbolic. The abyss of unconscious decision vibrates with an immense energy, and when we catch a glimpse of this impossibility in a mytho-poetics of the Symbolic's genesis, we simultaneously see a glimmer in the corner of our eye of why idealism is such an explosive event in being, despite the ontological solipsism of idealism itself. But such an epiphany is limited by the very impossibility of its object, for we have fallen into a new age of mythology that has been rationally justified. Yet language is always more language (this is the major consequence of the Real), and if ontology and metaphysics have been rendered impossible, insofar as we can see this fact for what it is, we must have the right to investigate it in a non-rational discourse, no matter what the status of idealism's self-overcoming.

Although a transcendental materialism developed après-coup in the enclosed terrain of a radical idealism may always leave the realist unsatisfied as to its very possibility, turning epistemological limit into positive ontological condition via a mytho-poetic narrativization of being's self-division does allow us to make minimal ontological claims that go beyond mythological imagery. If the Symbolic does present itself as quasi-full-blown constructionism of reality that cuts all ties with an extra-notional, extra-linguistic outside, then the very founding gesture of the Symbolic's self-containment must be structurally homologous with that of psychosis understood as a withdrawal from social reality into an irreal self, and thus must attest to an originary madness at the very ontogenetic basis of human subjectivity. In this respect, were one to refuse the move to mythology as a means of overcoming radical idealism as a mere confabulation that assures the consistency of its order by the production of false memories, the latter would nevertheless reveal a deadlock haunting subjectivity: the deadlock of ontological catastrophe. If the Symbolic exists, then the world is, at best, a fragmented totality whimpering under its own weight—a totality that, unable to posit itself as all, in the case of at least one creature (man) is forced to withdraw into a nocturnal irreal self due to a primordial moment of metaphysical trauma in its heart of hearts, thereby establishing the primary role of dislocation in ontology. Even if we might not be able to say more without writing a great fabulative epic, many details of which may succumb to confabulation and fantasmatic figures, the mere existence of a radically self-grounding idealism would not only demonstrate that reality split itself into two irreconcilable logical zones insofar as thought must exist, but more primordially that ontological catastrophe, whereby being is infinitely divided from itself and doomed to wander in a world of images that are images of nothing, is irreducible in the transcendental explanation of the conditions of the possibility of experience and the Symbolic. Idealism declares that something must have gone horribly wrong in the life of the absolute: for no God, no divine nature, could have wanted this to be our fate, since for both, our fate is tied up with theirs.