原文：Ian Parker, SLAVOJ ZIZEK: A Critical Introduction 第二章：用黑格尔启蒙 翻译：自译，渣翻勿cue，有错请讲，闻过则喜，善莫大焉
西欧启蒙运动是一场由理性的力量推动的知识和文化运动，并以打败中世纪的蒙昧主义为目标。它不仅是一种理解世界和我们在其中的立场的途径，是一系列前赴后继的用来改善心灵的哲学演练，而且是一种从制度上嵌入到了政府形式中的道德改善系统，甚至已经起到了一种心理健康的程序的作用。这种启蒙运动只是在名义上局限于十八世纪，因为个体的人类主体的核心——思考-推理的基础点，在更早的十七世纪时就由笛卡尔确立了，而又在很久以后的二十世纪才由弗洛伊德付诸实施。
弗洛伊德曾把精神分析的目标定义为“增强自我”、“拓宽它的感知的领域、扩大它的组织”，并把他当时的论述1总结于这样的一句话，巧妙地将这种照亮自身的形象，与进步的形象、文明干地扩展「译注：指荷兰阿夫鲁戴克大堤的填海造陆工程」的形象结合了起来：“本我曾在处，自我将出现。这正是文化的作用，与须德海的干涸不乏相似之处。”2 下面必须把这种说法严格地重新解读，把它改造为拉康式的，把精神分析改造成既是启蒙运动的一部分、同时又是对启蒙运动的自我否定的批判。这是下一章的问题。但首先，远在弗洛伊德之前，还有一个原始精神分析的（proto-psychoanalytic）人物处于启蒙运动的中心，齐泽克把他用作定位自己的一副罗盘。对齐泽克来说，是黑格尔在事后向我们展示了，启蒙计划是关于什么的，它可能会成为什么样子。
黑格尔的作品中主要有三种组件引起齐泽克的兴趣——普遍性、自反性和否定性——我们在本章中将重点关注这些组件。可以说，黑格尔处于一个哲学反思的传统之中，齐泽克借用这个传统，又从中加以干预；而我们只有牢记这些关键的黑格尔的参考点，才能理解齐泽克在其他理论、文化和政治辩论中的所作所为。 ==ENLIGHTENMENT – WITH HEGEL 37== 黑格尔通常为人接受的形象像是一个司仪神甫：世界精神在普鲁士国家中展开，并呈现出自身的完整形式，他就为之庆祝；而这里的黑格尔与此大不相同。3 齐泽克的黑格尔，则是一种革命精神：它敞开了理论的体系；断裂时刻使批判性思维成为可能性，而对它来说，这一时刻又是持久不灭的、辩证的不可能性点。 说这是齐泽克作品中黑格尔的“积极”方面，那就误导人了，因为这个黑格尔是关于永久的拒绝。齐泽克在《延迟的否定》中通过批判哲学，对意识形态进行了持续的批判。齐泽克的黑格尔就是这种批判，无法愈合的伤痛，是他说的“不”。笛卡尔曾声称他已经识别出了一个点位，他可以在其上确定它本身——“Cogito ergo sum”，“我思故我在”4——并且它在哲学反思的历史中找到了那个虚幻的理性之主权（mastery）的位置，以表明它为何会在意识形态上作用得这么好的同时却在概念层面上失效。
我们可以说，齐泽克的大作《延迟的否定》是关于启蒙的，它闪耀着光辉；他在书快结尾处描述东欧民族主义的爆发，专门用来破除作为“大写起源之神话”的“族裔根源的传说”。这里我们从黑格尔那里学到的是，“民族遗产”是“当权的意识形态为了模糊它当下的冲突而回溯创制的一种意识形态化石”。5 从一开始就有一种禁令，不让“批判性知识分子”占据任何让当下的对抗保持开放的立场，不许拒绝任何对矛盾的和谐解决的诱惑。 此书开篇写到布加勒斯特示威者庆祝推翻齐奥塞斯库、撕掉罗马尼亚国旗上的红星的例子；撕出来的洞本身就是一个动员点。 这个点将由一个批判性的知识分子占据并维持它的敞开，作为令某种“尚未被任何实证的（positive）意识形态计划霸权化”之物保持开放的尝试。6 这是齐泽克的自我否定的黑格尔在行动。
但是在黑格尔式哲学中也有一些隐含的让人回答“好”的引诱，我们这里就要转向这个“肯定的”方面，它代表了齐泽克作品中某些问题更多一点的东西。 鉴于齐泽克在他更早的书中的评论，他在《论信仰》中对基督的热情并不意外也不惊人。 《论信仰》遵循这样的轨迹：从异教信仰系统，经过佛教和赛博空间的诱惑，终于基督教重生的主题。 这里我们抵达了这样一个时刻，此时人类主体开放的伤口看似可以被治愈。7 这本书可能就是齐泽克关于启蒙的被光辉照亮的小书。 基督教关于实存“在信仰中重生”的观念给出了一些肯定性的历史时刻；按齐泽克的说法，它是人类历史上第一次为自己制订了“无条件的主体性的约定，据此，我们准备好了，要悬置我们的实存的伦理实体本身”。8 ==38 SLAVOJ ZIZEK== 问题是，这种对新的“绝对开端”的承诺不能使我们摆脱欧洲文化中基督教进步观念的历史重压，这些观念被西方哲学有力地转述，并被黑格尔等人作为反对较小宗教的论据转述。因此，本章停留在对黑格尔的讨论，以说明他可以多么有革命性，同时也拒绝背上那些仍然使他有时反动得令人难以置信的意识形态包袱。
黑格尔是怎么回事?
齐泽克的黑格尔与通常在西方哲学中传播的黑格尔的版本很不相同。9 这种差异良有其以，要找到这种原因得看他本地化的调校的模式，也就是为了使他更易为某种受众读懂而做的消化和变形，尤其是对于保守主义者，可以看到关于“精神”的发展的论述，应验了他们关于事物如何如其所是地成为了实存、几乎独立于物质条件的这种感觉。 这些本地的模式把黑格尔变成了一个可以接受的任务，让他可以在经院哲学中被仰慕或诋毁。 这种差异也在于针对特定文化的抵抗的策略——对他的否定的、违心的阅读，提取他作品中的激进成分的必要策略。 在齐泽克看来，对黑格尔的主流解读中有某些错误，他已不得不与它们斗争，才能为他的作品中对大写真理的回溯性建构立论，我们才能总是在他的作品中看到这些东西。而斗争的场地是很确切的：那就是法国。
不，不，不，不
黑格尔是德国唯心主义和随后的现象学的创始点，但他也是20世纪后期法国哲学的一个关键人物。齐泽克的早期工作是在德国哲学领域——他的第一本书是关于海德格尔和语言的10——但他对德国唯心主义者的阅读由他与法国知识分子辩论的相遇而被彻底地重新组织了。所谓的“后结构主义”哲学家也是“后现象学家”；例如德里达和福柯的著作中对阐释学和与“他者”的关系的阐述，就至少既是理解主体性的历史生产中的语言的结构的尝试，也同样是对黑格尔的争论的延续。那么，齐泽克所做的就是在这个传统中反对这个传统，找回黑格尔中最激进的东西，把黑格尔与解构主义对立起来，以揭示后者所缺乏的东西，比如它阐述自己的方式好像它是一种“元语言”（说得好像它完全在它所评论的语言之外）。 ==ENLIGHTENMENT – WITH HEGEL 39== 由此看来，德里达的结构并不像它看起来的那么激进，因为它重复了主流哲学的动作，而对他者的他者性的尊重似乎注定会重复宗教论题的相当传统的形式。 我们将看到，齐泽克如何用老式的黑格尔在这两个立场之间、在德里达和黑格尔之间打开了一片空间。
30年代，通过俄罗斯移民哲学家亚历山大$\cdot$科耶夫的讲座，在法国的历史和主体性哲学方面，黑格尔成为了一名重要的哲学家。11 1933到1939年间，科耶夫在巴黎讲座，许多法国知识分子定期参加；二战后围绕结构主义和现象学的辩论，其塑造者多在其列，其中包括毛里斯$\cdot$梅洛-庞第、乔治$\cdot$巴塔耶和雅克$\cdot$拉康。12 关于科耶夫，有人迷惑他为何自称是“斯大林主义最严格的服从者”13，这只有到许多年以后才得以澄清：他死后才传出，他彼时其实是在为苏联做代理人。 即使我们现在不把科耶夫对黑格尔的阅读约化为这一特定的政治站位，我们还是要知道，30年代以来法国的知识分子的辩论是重度政治化了的，哲学站位与其后果之间的短路被反反复复地制造再制造——像是要不要支持法共，然后要不要在中苏交恶中支持毛。14
而当齐泽克做评论时，他的倾向“几乎是毛主义的”。15 我们得记住，在这里，哲学辩论中的指标可能比直接的政治效忠更重要。 当然，哲学和政治站位之间的短路运作的方式自己就是一种政治问题（我们将在第4章讲到）。 不管怎么说，1930年代在巴黎重新出现的黑格尔都有点像个极左派；在他的作品中，有一个母题是：完全拒绝任何关于世界的公认的假设；我们至少可以从四个方面找到它。 首先，这个法式的黑格尔提请人注意我们关于世界的所知与世界自身之间不可救药的分离。 这个命名的过程本身就标志着人类对世界所做的某种暴力，而这种表象（representation）本身就是一种征服的形式，它俘获客体以及其中持有的主体，这种想法后来会成为法国哲学中的一个重要主题。16 语言中抓住了什么，也被必要地误读了，所以泛滥于人类主体间关系的“误认”的母题，也已经运作在人类实存与他们周围的环境之间的关系的问题中。 对黑格尔论点的一个较弱的理解是说，他旨在“动摇所有表象主义模型的根基”：17 对黑格尔来说，表象的过程——修理某种外在于我们对世界的感知的东西的尝试——不可能在全面反映任何在其本身之外的事物时取得实际的成功。18 ==40 SLAVOJ ZIZEK== 不管哪样，对齐泽克来说，重要的是我们阅读黑格尔的方式，我们需要拒绝“辩证综合”的诱惑，并从而避免任何这种演化式的观念：如此之物自可变为自反知晓其真所是之物，存在一种“从自在到自为的渐进的发展”。19 我们不会到达某个实现了我们所曾是的点，也不会与我们最终已经幸运地把它准确命名了的东西达成和解。
拒绝之母题（黑格尔称之为“否定性”）的第二种方式显现在人类主体间的关系中，而关于为取得他人的认可而斗争的论述正是科耶夫立论的核心。 对黑格尔来说，“争取承认是种生与死的斗争”；20 是胜利者与失败者间的一场战斗，胜利者将取得他者的承认成为主人，而失败者沦为客体的地位，作为奴隶去承认他者。21 这个主奴辩证法本身就包含了颠覆它自己的宿命逻辑，因为主人也已经困在了对奴隶的依赖关系中，而当奴隶开始意识到这一点，形势便会逆转。 我们会看到，齐泽克在为认可的斗争上采用了这种科耶夫式的结构，从而突出强调，想建立“主体间性”纽带、在其中真诚而开放地交流，这种尝试是失败的。 个人和共同体间的关系崩坏成族裔世仇和民族主义战争，这不是非理性的本能力量的功效，而是人类对他者有表象与依赖，崩坏正建立于这种表象与依赖的本性之上。
黑格尔拒绝公认假设的第三种方式是在他的作品中偶尔瞥见，当人类主体性被剥离了与他者的关系时，它的原爆点可能是什么。 这里，在他的“世界之夜”的母题中，可以到达某种东西，已经类似于“对原质的谋杀”（murder of the thing），只不过没有用这些词语来补饰。22 那些宣称世间万物都有错，而与他们无涉的人，以为自己是“美丽灵魂”的所在；而黑格尔谩骂他们，警告说“过度的主体性往往变成疯狂；它在思想中停驻，于是它陷入反思着的理解的涡流，对它自身总是否定的”。22 而齐泽克提请注意的则是，这其实是一种命运，所有从事创造性想象活动的人类，在打破舒适的常识性世界形象时，都会为它所困扰。 正是在这里，在人拒绝公认的日常世界的时候，在这个原爆点，主体性中的某些疯狂出现了：“这黑夜，这自然的内部，在幻化的表象之中，存在于此处——它围绕在纯粹自我的四面八方；黑夜中，这里冒出一个带血的头颅，那里又冒出一个煞白的幽灵，突然出现在此处，在纯粹自我的面前，又像这样突然地消失。”
==ENLIGHTENMENT – WITH HEGEL 41==
对黑格尔来说，这个黑夜是始终在场的：“一旦直视人类的双眼，就会看到这个黑夜——进入一个变得可怕的黑夜。”23
第四，最后一种，黑格尔对给定真理的全面拒绝是通向某种更重要的东西的途径。 “延迟于否定（耽于否定性）”也是为了找到通往大写真理的途径。 这条路线必定是迂回的，而且只有通过某种误认摸索出我们的途径，掌握这种误认的本性中的一些东西，我们才能掌握，是什么让大写真理成为了我们的大写真理，让它从结构上无法被简单直接地识别和掌握。 齐泽克强调，误认与可能掌握的大写真理之间的这个鸿沟是表象的内在结构的官能，不是什么在我们之外、阻碍我们看见事物本来面目的东西。 障碍的辩证法也是某些东西可能的条件，在他的写作中一再出现：“对黑格尔来说，外在的周围环境不是意识到内在潜力的阻碍，而是于此相反，内在潜力的真正本性只有在这样的竞技场中才能得到检验。”24 作为一个日常的例子，齐泽克描写了他在卢布里雅纳未能找到教职的失业时期，好像是一个糟糕的阻碍，而实际上却成为了这样的竞技场，他在其中得以在智识上得以发展并参与政治。
回答“是”的自反性方式
在科耶夫对黑格尔的阅读中，在我们对世界的表象与原质本身之间打开的鸿沟无法闭合，自我意识的形成所必需的为了得到认可的斗争不会结束，想做成任何事必须冒着彻底毁灭自身的危险，而从错误中浮现的真理转瞬即逝。对黑格尔否定性的这种强调是齐泽克作品的一大标志，但同时他也坚持认为黑格尔中自反性的元素也同样重要。我们上面的确已经在论述中不少次谈及了自反性。我们避不开它。比如，我们暂时回到前面的问题：我们的表象，与世界中的原质以及它的实际实存的方式，发生了分离。面对这鸿沟的两边，想象出第三个出发点，从那里出发可以观察这两边，倘若我们能占据这第三个独立的立场，就有可能准确地觉知事物的本来面目——这种想法很诱人。这是个诱惑就是，认为有种“元语言”，这个立场外在于或超乎这凌乱的分离。黑格尔的作品中必需有这种自反性质，它紧密结合于他的论点：任何立场都已是这凌乱的一部分。==42 SLAVOJ ZIZEK== 所以，作为对否定性四方面的对比补充，我们转而讨论黑格尔的自反性的四方面。
首先，知觉总是“由观察着的主体辩证地介导的”。25一旦严肃地对待了这个基本的现象学立场，就不可能再想出任何评判，而不在评判前就已带上观察者这特异的主体立场。于是，在恐怖场景中，对他们而言，局外人的凝视总是一种独特的恐怖；而他们对其所见者的幻想性介入，携带了他们想在那里见到什么、不想在那里见到什么的信息。齐泽克最喜欢把这个观念用于发现邪恶的凝视之类：“像黑格尔讲的，有邪恶效果的东西归根结底是凝视本身，它把事物的一个状态知觉为邪恶的”。26比如，西方对萨拉热窝之毁坏的凝视，本身就是“邪恶的”，这是说，它焦虑地搜寻受害者的形象，而受害者的命运至少有一部分是在帝国主义的策划无可挽回地决定了的。
有一种方式，它把人自己的所在系统地排除在了其所见之外。这是黑格尔自反性的第二方面。就在这里，他注意到某种东西，它比简单的对法国存在主义的“坏的信仰”更具有诱惑性。对黑格尔来说，为自己开脱罪责的这种策略性尝试，本身是一个站位，他把它表述为那种“美丽的灵魂”。他对美丽灵魂的描绘，与法国浪漫主义传统中卢梭的belle âme（美丽灵魂）异曲同工27——这样的描述使人们注意到，有人为了反对政治，绞尽脑汁做了各种各样的策略性尝试，他们身在自由派学术界，“永远高于任何行动，永远对着腐败的世界沉吟”，或者诉诸“良好的意图与复杂的情况”来为所做所为正名。28然而，在黑格尔对美丽灵魂的主体性的表述中却暗示，所有这些主体都纠缠在他者的欲望中，纠缠于其自我意识与他者之间必要的相互依赖。：“主体性存在于缺失中，却被驱向某种坚实之物；因此它始终只是一种渴望。”29这种灵魂是在想象，只有其他人才这样受到折磨；这才着实是所谓美丽的灵魂。问题是，人们怎么才会承认这个立场。
第三个自反性的方面是，人的站位总是由某种文化、历史环境给定的，而对黑格尔来说，这构成了特定种类人类经验的一部分，而生活条件嵌入在主体性的形式中，他把这些都称为“作为主体的实体”的产生。例如，在他对希腊文化的讨论中他描述过，社群的自我反思如何产生了特定的目的论形态（teleological shape）给予社会生活，再把对活着是什么的回答给予个体的意识：“这必然地导致，这些机构开始认为，决定他们的实践的根基处于这些实践本身的结构之内”。30 ==ENLIGHTENMENT – WITH HEGEL 43== 黑格尔用这个希腊文化的例子做论据并非偶然。对黑格尔和整个德国唯心主义，以及许多二战后的法国作品来说，希腊在实体变成主体的时候发生的事情，在欧洲开创了某种进步的、不可逆转的东西。31齐泽克重新加工了这个观念，把它应用于主体与神秘、不可得的实体的分离的方式，使得看似处于它之外的实体，变成嵌入到了主体本身——作为分裂的主体。他描述这一过程，仿佛它是无时间的，关系于作为上帝的大写绝对主体，32但同时他仍然坚持主体作为实体的产生，认为它重复了为启蒙奠基的文化历史时刻。
第四，我们已经讲过，对黑格尔来说，去往大写真理的旅途要通过错误，这条旅途的特征，不仅是有“后来才发现它只是更多的误认”这样形式的承认，而且是有对“我们将要发现它是什么”的回溯性建构。这种回溯效应假设出来一个基础。它包含了这个假设，我们才能抵达这个基础本身。 定位我们的解读和行动本身的预设，这种回溯性效应，也服务于另一族黑格尔式概念，这些概念是关于对我们吁求之物的似乎独立于我们评判的“自反性决定”。 对于一个系统与假装立于其外之物之间关系的复杂性，黑格尔的“思辨统一”（speculative identity）这一概念有时也起到提请注意的作用。 拉康在弗洛伊德的创伤分析中重新发现了这种回溯效应的重要性，这也把黑格尔，回溯性地，转变为了精神分析的一种哲学资源。
这样定位我们在其上行动的基础本身，对齐泽克至关重要，例如对关于民族国家形象中“遗产”的回溯性建构的描述。 我们的“民族国家”、“共同体”或“民族”总是已经在那里，必须先解决和暴露这种强有力的意识形态观念，然后我们才能看见，我们过的生活是我们已经得而为自己创建了的生活。 齐泽克还在这种过程中把这种观念暴露了出来：革命行动最终成功，是通过他们的这种能力，即把过往的失败设定为其历史记忆的一部分。 在与德国唯心主义传统以及它后来在瓦尔特$\cdot$本雅明作品中的重生的链接中，我们再次看到，对齐泽克而言，原本只是单纯错误的东西成为了真理显现的前兆——真理显现于本雅明的“革命性凝视的观念，认为实际的革命行动是对过去失败的解放尝试的救赎性重复”。33
从特殊性到对抗性的普遍性
要谈自反性过程——要在一个人用以建构世界的凝视中识别出这个人的立场，要坦然接受人在世界的不完美中的角色，要从形成了给定文化条件下主体性的实体性背景设定的周围环境中有意识地设定出人的立场，以及要知道一个人是在追溯性地构成自己行动的基础——这也是要从自我封闭的个人的圈子转移到“普遍性”的领域。 ==44 SLAVOJ ZIZEK== 与普遍性的这一链接是黑格尔作品中齐泽克经常讨论的一个关键主题。在对黑格尔的阅读中，对于普遍性，有不同的、竞争的版本：有两种是简单的约化——约化为个人发展或者历史向前行进；另一种则尝试把这两种元素结合到某种“第三道路”上；还有一种真正辩证的对抗性结合。只有在这第四种版本中，否定性和自反性才起到了链接个体性、特殊与普遍的作用。
第一个版本以个人为中心，这里有传统人道主义的诱惑，它陶醉于黑格尔的评论：“普遍的自我意识是在另一个自我中对自我的肯定性认识”。34 在这里，抵达“普遍性”意味着和其他人一样、一起绽放为一个人类的意识、一种仁慈的自我实现（self-actualisation），即成为真正的和无处不在的完全的人类。这个形成自我的发展过程中，大量的自反性将有所助益——德国唯心主义者和当时的清谈阶层把这个过程称为修养（Bildung）35——但是是否定性构成了主体并在其中心建构了主体，当它抹除了所有否定性的痕迹时，它实际上变成了布尔乔亚主体自大的自我满足。
第二种版本是科耶夫的路线，这里，它被看作为了获得认可而做的无可避免的历史性斗争，主人会领教，当他们的努力意识到主人根本就依赖与他们之时，他们就无法保持权力了。这是一个血腥的历史过程，在黑格尔写作之时尚未抵达终点，而科耶夫也未尝诱使其听众认为这战斗已经在苏联抵达幸福、和谐的结局。然而，一直有一点点诱饵，希望有个最终的解决；而且在对黑格尔的这一误读中，科耶夫唤起大写历史的运动的方式很类似早期现代人唤起大写自然，都是看作“自我修正的事业、注定了会有正确的结局，即使我们有限的人类无法看到它是怎么运作的。”36
结合这两种视角的一条路线是采取一条“第三道路”来阅读黑格尔，解决个人和社会的冲突，得到“普遍阶级”的启蒙了的活动。这一选择当然对学者很有吸引力，当他们想象有批判性的知识分子的角色可以为良好的社会管理作出贡献时就更是如此。在上一章我们看到了，这对在南斯拉夫官僚机器中掌权的温和斯大林主义者来说尤其有吸引力。 ==ENLIGHTENMENT – WITH HEGEL 45== 这一道路中，“布尔乔亚社会的阶级划分和冲突所促进的个人和普遍利益的无意识认同，在他［黑格尔］所说的‘理性的’或‘社会的’国家中被锻造成一个积极活动的、自觉的原则”。37
相较而言，齐泽克对黑格尔的阅读提取了人类活动和经验的两个辩证相关的方面。我们已经讲到，对齐泽克来说“批判性知识分子”的角色是保持事物的开放，而不是闭合鸿沟。主奴辩证法是可以解读成一则人类学童话，约化成每个个体主体中自我意识的故事，精神在历史中的辩证展开也可以解读成对文明发展以及人类共同体的进步成果的论述。但是，所有这些叙事都分开于等式的个体和社会两端，都剥离了黑格尔最激进的东西。通过在他人的信仰之中的信仰构成的方式，以及看似是限制之物是去考虑某事的可能性之条件的方式，我们可以看到，这个等式的两端是辩证相关的。
齐泽克经常谈论人自己的信仰与他人信仰的交织，这如下论述中得到了有效的发挥：呼吁信徒共同体的存在，就能规制犬儒主义，以及一种特殊形式的被动性：“交互被动性”（interpassivity）。38 当双方辩证地交互相关时，我们可以看到，“普遍者”既不呈现为特定事件的附加，也不呈现为量变或事例积累成的质变。 特别的事物可能同时就涉及到普遍的事物，关涉到人的境况，人们将来理解这种境况时，会认为它本身就依据于整个历史的基础之上。 要实现这第四个版本的普遍性，只有通过与过往根本决裂、开放地面对每个人类主体同承载我们所有人的整个历史之间的辩证的相互依赖。 于是我们有了一个问题，齐泽克简洁地总结了这个问题，好像它只是一个解答似的：“在一场革命的主流中，黑格尔会称为‘抽象否定性’的这种展现只会，如其所曾是的，扫清战场，方便第二次行动、新秩序的施行。”39 否定性是一次开放、一次革命性的断裂，但它也可能预示一次更可怕的报复性的闭合。
革命性的断裂
关于科耶夫对法国知识分子辩论的影响，文森$\cdot$德贡布在他很有影响力的20世纪30至70年代的法国哲学调查中评论道：“最大的特征无过于辩证一词内涵经历的变化”。40 ==46 SLAVOJ ZIZEK== 变换
from dialectic viewed by neo-Kantians as a mere ‘logic of appearances’ to the claim that it ‘could never be the object of concepts, since its movement engenders and dissolves them all’41 – could be seen as a shift of attention from surface to depth, to something underneath that would explain why things appear as they do. That formulation of the dialectic, which was offered by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1960, draws attention to the way recent French philosophy repeats the very history it attempts to escape. Note, for example, that Sartre’s formulation cited here about the dialectic engendering and dissolving all other concepts still supposes it to function as an underlying, numinous, dynamic force. That formulation anticipates some of the later appeals to différance much beloved by the followers of Derrida and deconstruction, and it is not clear that différance as ‘originary delay’ is not itself ‘reducible to Hegel’s dialectic of identity’.42 This is the tradition Zizek is borrowing from and pitting himself against.
What Zizek is able to open up is the way that this transformation itself demands a dialectical reading. Then the Hegelian dialectic resuscitated by Kojève can be put to work backwards, as it were, to read Kant so as to retrieve something disturbingly dialectical in his work, and forward to read Heidegger to stop the dialectic from being shut down. When Zizek seizes an understanding of the dialectic from Kojève he is thus taking it well beyond that rather partial presentation of Hegel in the 1930s lectures, and bringing it out of the limited frame of the French disputes. By tarrying with the Kantian moment for a while, then, we will be able to see why Hegel spends so much time battling with Kant, and why Zizek is so keen on Hegel. Zizek’s Hegel keeps the enlightenment open as a revolutionary force, but this openness is more ambiguous and less revolutionary than it seems.
Backward: A Hegelian angle on Kant In his essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, written in 1784, Kant raises the slogan of enlightenment as ‘have the courage to use your own understanding’. For Kant, ‘the freedom to use reason publicly on all matters’ is the only requirement for the development of an ‘age of enlightenment’ in which we have emerged from our ‘self-imposed immaturity’, immaturity which he defines as ‘the inability to use one’s own understanding without guidance from another’.43 Metaphors of development jostle alongside images of independence of thought and rational appraisal to make it seem as if the Kantian subject is an uncom- plicated, clear-thinking, autonomous individual, but things are actually a little more complex than this.
What Kant opens up is a rigorous examination of the ‘conditions of possibility’44 of our experience of objects, in such a way that it also requires an examination of how it is that those objects are constituted by us. When
ENLIGHTENMENT – WITH HEGEL 47
Kant likens his shift of focus to the Copernican revolution in astronomy it is clear to Zizek that what this shift requires is a radical transformation of how we think about the place of the spectator. Kant comments that Copernicus discovered that he could not make any progress when he still assumed that the heavenly bodies revolved around the spectator, and so ‘he reversed the process, and tried the experiment of assuming that the spectator revolved, while the stars remained at rest’.45 Now what this entailed, according to Zizek, was that ‘the subject loses its substantial stability/identity and is reduced to the pure substanceless void of the self- rotating abyssal vortex called “transcendental apperception”’.46 Note here the resonance between this image of the ‘abyssal vortex’ in Kant and Hegel’s ‘night of the world’ as a reduction to degree zero of experience that is chaotic, void of reason.
This means that consciousness itself is cracked open, and the question now shifts from one of ‘conditions of possibility’ to ‘conditions of impos- sibility’.47 For Zizek, ‘self-consciousness is positively founded upon the non-transparency of the subject to itself’,48 and this non-transparency not only causes havoc with traditional readings of Kant but also opens up a fracture in Kant’s own image of the subject so that it becomes other to itself: ‘the Kantian transcendental apperception (i.e., the self-consciousness of pure I) is possible only insofar as I am unattainable to myself in my noumenal dimension, qua “Thing which thinks”’.49 After Hegel, then, we can see how the Kantian subject of reason is split so that reflexive con- sciousness is inhabited by a disturbing negativity.
The Kantian reasoning subject is also a moral subject, and the ability to reason with others for the good of oneself, as a good that one might also imagine as applicable to them, also holds within it an impossible, irresolv- able tension. The problem is that conscience does not complement consciousness to make it more beneficent to others, but rather plagues it, so that the will to do good will feel diseased and hateful; there is only one thing of which moral conscience can be certain, and that is that it will be aware of infractions of the moral law. Kant argues that ‘there is no man so depraved but that he feels upon transgressing the internal law a resistance within himself and an abhorrence of himself’.50 So here Kant is not posing two separate phenomena, the moral law and transgressions of it; rather ‘he is arguing that our only consciousness of the law is our consciousness of our transgression of it’.51 As Gilles Deleuze puts it, the law for Kant ‘defines a realm of transgression where one is already guilty, and where one oversteps the bounds without knowing what they are’.52 This comment by Deleuze is symptomatic of the way Kant has returned to the scene in recent French philosophy, as a figure who is read through Hegel and turned into someone who then seems to anticipate psychoanalytic specifications of the
48 SLAVOJ ZIZEK
role of the super-ego. Against that symptomatic background, Zizek’s own work does in many respects seem less startlingly original.
Joan Copjec – a key and not fully acknowledged resource for many of
Zizek’s linking arguments around Kant and psychoanalytic social theory53
points out that if we do ‘freely choose to obey our sensible inclinations’, as Kant says, ‘then some evidence of our freedom or of our capacity to resist these inclinations must betray itself in our actions’.54 This brings us up against the limits of moral reasoning in Kant, to a necessary irrational underside to the apparently so reasonable Kantian subject. If it is the case that ‘Our guilt is all we know of the law’,55 then the leap from the level of a particular individual to the universal will pose more problems than it solves. To follow the law may not only bring us into line with things that are good for us or others, it may take us somewhere less pleasant.
Alenka Zupancic, one of ‘the Slovene Lacanian inner party circle’,56 elaborates the argument – which is a well-known one to Lacanians57 – that the Kantian moral subject is not at all cleansed of pathology. Precisely the reverse, for Kant supposes a slavish obedience to the law that smacks of perversity: ‘we could say that the pathological takes revenge and imposes its law by planting a certain kind of pleasure along the path of the categorical imperative’.58 Note here that once the Hegelian reflexive question about the subject’s constitutive role in phenomena it relates to is brought into play we have to ask what the subject gets out of obeying the law. There is no place of innocence, no place for a ‘beautiful soul’ who is able to sidestep responsibility for their own part in obedience to the demand posed by the categorical imperative. What is at stake is obedience as such, rather than any particular good effect the individual can point to as a reason for having taken this or that course of action.
For Kant, the moral law does not define exactly what should or should not be done. It is ‘an enigmatic law which only commands us to do our duty, without ever naming it’.59 The worst that could happen, perhaps, is that Kantian subjects could turn themselves into instruments of the law, enjoying their relationship to law as the logical ultimate end-point of the desire to do good. And this worst outcome, which lies hidden inside the system supposed by Kant, is realised by those who make their enjoyment conform to a law. The Marquis de Sade, for example, is not the obvious candidate for being considered a good moral subject, but he does subordinate himself to the principle that full enjoyment is in line with the laws of nature, and the ultimate Sadeian fantasy is one of perpetual enjoyment in which the victim wants more and will never actually die.60 Zupancic’s reading of this logic – endorsed by Zizek in his foreword to her book61 – is that ‘Kant’s immortality of the soul promises us, then, quite a
ENLIGHTENMENT – WITH HEGEL 49
peculiar heaven; for what awaits ethical subjects is a heavenly future that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Sadeian boudoir.’62
In a Hegelian reading of the historical emergence of the Kantian moral subject from times of ‘revolutionary Terror’, Zizek opens up once more the dependence of the individual on others and the way this dependence is relayed even into the apparent freedom of the individual: ‘the passage to moral subjectivity occurs when this external terror is internalised by the subject as the terror of the moral law, of the voice of conscience’.63 The ‘age of enlightenment’, then, does not come out of nowhere – there are certain historical conditions in European history that are the necessary background for it – and it does not issue in wholesome, free-thinking individuals. Hegel suspected as much, and Zizek drives home that lesson.
There is a paradox in Zizek’s reading of Kant, which is that at the very same moment that Kant seems to be positing a subject who follows universal maxims in order to act ethically there is also, Zizek argues, ‘a crack in universality’. That is, the fracture that is opened up in the Kantian conception of the subject, conscience and the relation to the law – opened up with the aid of Hegel, something that we are now able to see in Kant after the event – is, perhaps, primary. For Zizek, then, ‘Kant was revolutionary because he was antiuniversalist’,64 and the relation to the universal is precisely something that has to be struggled with and assumed by the subject. It cannot be taken for granted as an unproblematic ground for action, with deviations from it being consigned to the realm of pathology. At moments Zizek too is toying with the idea of what Kant at one moment in his later writing65 called ‘radical evil’ as an ‘ethical’ position that precedes adopting the course of the good in line with the categorical imperative (in which one treats as ethical only those actions that would be applicable to all others). However, ‘radical evil’ is also for Zizek but another way of opening up the split in the subject. It is a way of forcing a split between the ‘thinking’ and ‘being’ of the Cartesian subject and keeping open the split between the individual subject and the subject called upon by a community – the poison chalice of Heidegger’s humanism.
Forward: A Hegelian angle on Heidegger For Zizek earlier on in his career – well before the interest in his work outside Slovenia – Heidegger was quite an attractive theoretical option, and Zizek was not much dissuaded by the official academic party line that Heidegger was suspect because of his support for the Nazis.66 Heidegger notoriously gave a speech upon assuming the position of Rector of Freiburg University in 1934 praising Hitler, and never fully recanted this crime. The claim that a philosopher should not be taken seriously because of some act of stupidity or mendacity is a spurious reason for excluding them from the
50 SLAVOJ ZIZEK
canon if it fails to attend to the intimate connection between that act and the philosopher’s theoretical framework. That intimate connection, obscured by purely personal attacks, did become clear to Zizek (as it did also to Derrida and other writers in France).
One of the peculiarities of philosophy in Yugoslavia, and a marker of the distinct path the bureaucracy took away from Moscow, was that there was hardly any Soviet-style dialectical materialism taught. In Slovenia from the 1970s forms of ‘Western Marxism’, mainly around the axis of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, were dominant – and this would mean that some of the positions of the Praxis philosophers based in Belgrade would be acceptable67 – and Heideggerians working alongside other forms of phe- nomenology occupied the position of dissidence. To be sceptical about critical theory and Heidegger was a third position that Zizek eventually adopted, and this would entail a turn to French theoretical debates. This situation was made still more complicated by the way Heideggerianism operated as the orthodoxy and Western Marxism as dissidence in other parts of Yugoslavia; in Croatia one could be dismissed from an academic post with the reasons articulated in Heideggerian terms, such as (in Zizek’s own sarcastic caricature of such academic formulations at the time) ‘the essence of self-defence was the self-defence of the essence of our society’.68 ‘All of a sudden’, Zizek claims, he became aware that ‘the Yugoslav Heideggerians were doing exactly the same thing with respect to the Yugoslav ideology of self-management as Heidegger himself did with respect to Nazism’.69
While Heideggerians might sometimes be sniffy enough about any particular existing community, Zizek’s argument is that they will eventually be seduced by one that seems powerful and all-embracing enough, for they operate on the assumption that beneath, behind or before technolo- gically-distorted forms of Being-in-the-world there is some way of Being in which we are genuinely at one with others. The merely empirical ‘ontic’ things of the world are insufficient for Heideggerians because they yearn for the real thing, the real things with deep ‘ontological’ weight, things that inhere in our very Being. There is, then, a paradoxical substantialisation of Truth as Truth, something that would one day wipe away error. A community that would promise to retrieve the Truth of Being would thus be truly great. Heideggerians are ‘eternally in search of a positive, ontic political system that would come closest to the epochal ontological truth’.70 This is ‘a strategy which inevitably leads to error’,71 but the Heideggerians will never learn the lesson that the fact of error does not necessarily portend the disclosure of deep Truth. Heidegger’s ‘mistake’ in hailing the ‘greatness’ of Nazism, then, was deeper and more dangerous than it seemed. Bad enough as an endorsement of Hitler, Heidegger’s mistake revealed how the
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lure of a substantive coherent community would always be operative for a philosophical system that was waiting for some authentic Volkish rebellion against inauthentic modern life.
A Hegelian attention to the ‘reflexive determination’ of phenomena – that we constitute as objects for us those others we relate to – is useful here. Heidegger was looking for the Nazis, for something like them. To understand this fatal flaw in Heidegger, then, we need ‘to grasp the complicity (in Hegelese ‘speculative identity’) between the elevation above ontic concerns and the passionate “ontic” Nazi political engagement’.72 Heideggerians in Yugoslavia, and particularly in Slovenia, could see that the fascination with the German Volk was an ‘error’, but they could not resist the lure of another apparently more genuine community – one with an essence worthy of self-defence – and so their identification with that community led to defence of it against those seemingly inauthentic elements that disrupted it. The Hegelian attention to reflexivity, then, needs to be augmented with an emphasis on negativity, something Heidegger had attempted to seal over, for what he lacked was ‘insight into the radically antagonistic nature of every hitherto communal way of life’.73
The dialectical leap from particular, internally differentiated communities and the universal then entails some suspicion of the idea that any community is deep down authentic. This is why Zizek pours scorn, for example, on the claim that with the breakdown of Stalinist bureaucratic rule in Eastern Europe the ‘original’ cultures were able once again to reassert themselves. In a comment that connects nicely with Marxist historical studies of the ‘invention of tradition’,74 he points out that in the case of Slovenia the ‘national costumes were copied from Austrian costumes, they were invented towards the end of the last century’.75
What Zizek does in Tarrying with the Negative, then, is to use Hegel to trace a line through the development of Western philosophy and to show how the analysis can be put to work to understand the disintegration of the Eastern European bureaucracies and the concomitant explosion of nationalist movements. The analysis has implications for how we read recent phenomenological and ‘post-structuralist’ theories, and for how we locate theory in history. The claim in phenomenology, for example, that it is possible to strip away all presuppositions and so to return to the things themselves has rendered itself subject to the temptation of the metalan- guage, but it also produces an illusory, disengaged form of subjectivity which does not own up to its own contribution to what it sees around it. In the case of the ‘post-structuralists’ – pretenders to the throne after the apparent displacement of Hegel – the elaborate rhetorical hedging in deconstruction of philosophical argument so that one will not be caught advocating any particular position also falls prey to the temptation of the
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metalanguage.76 Zizek uncovers the various ways in which the image of an individual, rational, thinking subject, the return to the things themselves free of any mediation, or a theoretical system or community that will serve as a self-sufficient homogeneous guarantee of the truth, all operate as lures to entice us into positions that are dodgy theoretically and dangerous politically.
REDEMPTIVE CLOSURE
Tarrying with the Negative also takes the much riskier step of stringing together the arguments in and against the different philosophical systems into a narrative, in which later writers accumulate earlier theoretical resources and improve upon them. So, ‘Plato accepts from the sophists their logic of discursive argumentation, but uses it to affirm his commitment to Truth’, and then ‘Kant accepts the breakdown of the traditional metaphysics, but uses it to perform his transcendental turn.’77 Hegel is not the Absolute master at the end of the story for Zizek, but he does come to stand at the highest point of the Zizekian conceptual universe. So far we have seen that the conceptual struggle between Kant and Hegel serves to define Hegel’s own position, and how this is crucial to an understanding of where Hegel and then Zizek are coming from, in terms of the rhetorical structure of their arguments as well as the theoretical grounds from which they argue. One finds buried in this rhetorical structure many of the theoretical motifs in Hegel’s work, and Zizek then mines that work as a rev- olutionary resource to critique later philosophical frameworks that only apparently supersede Hegel.
Absolutely European Where Hegel does not seem so easily assimilated to revolution is where he develops an historical analysis of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity that is very much in line with German idealism’s mixture of casual and deliberate anti-semitism.78 (This is an analysis that will also have repercussions for the way Freud will be placed and read by Zizek, as we shall see in later chapters.) The argument in On Belief – eight years on from Tarrying with the Negative – takes up already oft-rehearsed positions on these issues in Zizek’s earlier writing, and it connects with current theological motifs in French intellectual work. One question here is whether Zizek’s attempt to retrieve Christianity speaks to something genuinely present in Hegel, to which the answer seems yes. A further question is whether it also speaks of something worse in the role Christianity plays in contemporary Eurocentrism. Perhaps it is possible to disentangle
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Christianity from European thought, but it does not appear that Zizek wants to do that; what we end up with then are some bad premises and an evasion of where they lead through the adoption of some strange contra- dictory positions. For Zizek, the universalism he finds in Hegel and champions against petty rival particularities – of individual subjects seeking to dominate others so that they may be the master among slaves, or of ethnic communities establishing their superiority over lesser peoples – is rooted in Europe: ‘universalism is a Eurocentrist notion’.79 He is upfront about it, and insists there is no way of avoiding it. The appeal to ‘freedom and democracy’ in Third World countries against European imperialism is itself endorsing European premises.80
These premises then encompass the history of philosophical development in Europe, so that the kind of pluralism in which it is possible to argue against Eurocentrism is something that is ‘only possible against the notion that tradition is ultimately something contingent, against the background of an abstract, empty Cartesian subject’.81 The legacy of Descartes is precisely that he opened up a space in which the purely formal quality of thinking was the only thing of which we could be certain. The peculiar ethnic content of what it is to be a subject is something that may be mobilised against Western European enlightenment notions as its hideous reverse; but claims to universality, even when used to seek independence from Europe, are set in and against, embedded in that tradition.
This ‘radically Eurocentric’ stance has been an enduring theme in Zizek’s work. Back in 1992 he gave the example of the Congress Party in India being founded by Indians educated at Eton, Cambridge and Oxford so that ‘the very idea “let’s get rid of English colonialism, let’s return to our autonomous India” was strictly a product of English colonialism’.82 In a recent interview, Zizek asks his interviewer to remember ‘that in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the ANC always appealed to universal Enlightenment values, and it was Buthelezi, the regime’s black supporter in the pay of the CIA, who appealed to special African values’.83 The trick here, of course (as with his claim that the West really wanted to keep Yugoslavia together), is that it overlooks the way rivalries between Europe and America are played out through different, competing forms of intervention.
The trajectory of Western philosophical thought – from Plato to Descartes to Kant to Hegel to Heidegger – thus includes within it retroactive deter- mination aplenty, but it is still presented as a trajectory that is proceeding to greater enlightenment. One of the striking things about On Belief is the way that Heidegger is used to warrant arguments about the value of Western thought. There is something of a cyclical movement of fascination and
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frustration with Heidegger in Zizek’s work, and in On Belief nearly all the references to Heidegger are positive. For a start, despite his own interest in ‘Oriental thought’ – a preoccupation that Zizek is keen now to consign to the world of the ‘pagans’ – we are told that Heidegger saw ‘the main task of Western thought today’ as ‘to defend the Greek breakthrough, the founding gesture of the “West”’, something which also requires ‘the overcoming of the pre-philosophical mythical “Asiatic” universe’.84 And perhaps the worst of Heidegger is still alive in Zizek when his discussion of the ‘catastrophe that is man himself’ leads him, in The Puppet and the Dwarf, to pose the question ‘Is it possible to claim, in a nonobscene way, that the Holocaust is nothing in comparison with the catastrophe of the forgetting of being?’85 Surely this reveals the necessary and inescapable perverse core of this strand of German idealism.
What are the consequences of defending the ‘Greek breakthrough’ today, after Hegel? The aim does not seem to be to seal things over directly with the promise that we would at last realise some greatness in the European Community. It does, however, still seem to search for some event of the kind that happened in Greece when substance became subject and there was a reflexive assumption of what it is to think as a human being linking the individual with the universal. And, worse, it seems to hold out the hope of a search for something that would offer an image of openness, the production of a subject as split – reflexive, negative, universal – but which performs that openness as redemptive closure nonetheless.
Already Zizek has embedded his account of this new, ostensibly more open subject in relation to the god of Judeo-Christian thought – and the running together of these two terms ‘Judeo’ and ‘Christian’ is problematic enough, as we will see shortly. Further, in the context of a relationship to God as the Absolute, he argues that ‘to conceive Substance as Subject means precisely that split, phenomenalisation, and so forth, are inherent to the life of the Absolute itself’.86 In Tarrying with the Negative, he claims that the ‘truly subversive gesture’ is to ‘grasp Christianity itself “in its becoming”, before its horizon of meaning was established’.87 Now in On Belief, the reference point is more concrete, for that moment of ‘becoming’ is the moment when Christ died to redeem us all.
Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting? Although much of Zizek’s writing about Christianity – both in The Fragile Absolute and On Belief – does have the flavour of an evangelical pamphlet bringing the ‘good news’ to the reader, he also takes pains to emphasise that the ‘good news’ is a mixed blessing; that Christianity offers a ‘religiously mystified version’ of ‘a radical opening’ to universality. He is actually, he
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claims, still a ‘fighting atheist’, and cheerfully proposes that churches should be ‘turned into grain silos or palaces of culture’. It is what Christianity opens up as ‘direct access to universality’ that is important, and he insists that ‘What interests me is only this dimension.’88 However, Zizek’s account of what is ‘opened up’ in the course of European history places it in a linear succession of belief systems, so that it is only possible to think of ‘substance becoming subject’ in Greece and then of a ‘new beginning’ in such a way as to privilege Christianity. What is ‘opened up’ is then the possibility of redemption, but this move also closes down other religions that were mere precursors to the arrival of the really good news. Significantly, the relation of the community of believers to the figure of the Jew as outsider comes into focus in a different way in Zizek’s recent writing, and it is reconfigured as Christianity in relation to Judaism. The logic of the argument here is still strictly Hegelian, and all of the problems with Hegel in relation to Judaism also start to flood into the picture. The ‘history of the West’, then, is put by Zizek into a series of different kinds
of ‘unplugging’.89
First, ‘the Greek philosophical wondering “unplugs” from the immersion [of the subject] into the mythical universe’.90 Here we have an appeal to a fairly orthodox Hegelian conception of the way the ‘substance’ of a particular form of community life – the ‘mythical universe’ Zizek is referring to here – became ‘subject’, so that a new self-reflexive form of human experience could open up. This is pretty much of a piece with Heidegger’s account of the ‘founding gesture’ of the West in Greece. After that gesture, that opening, nothing will be the same again. Really this is not so very different from the standard self-image of enlightened Western philosophy. Zizek’s position here echoes that of colleagues and friends in Slovenia and France in the 1980s.
In this conception, the universalising moment which saw the birth of European civilisation is neither to be taken lightly nor to be lost and forgotten. This is a question with deep import, for it stands in ‘relation to the general history of humanity’, according to Cornelius Castoriadis in a commentary on the question of universality quoted and endorsed by Renata Salecl: ‘this history, this tradition, philosophy itself, the struggle for democracy, equality, and freedom are as completely improbable as the existence of life on Earth is in relation to the existence of solar systems in the Universe’.91 Castoriadis, an exile from Greece writing as an ex- Trotskyist who practised as a Lacanian psychoanalyst, is now recruited into a narrative about the birth of the European enlightenment elaborated by one of the leading lights of the ‘Slovene Lacanian School’. And again, this is in a well-worn tradition of Eurocentrism in French thought, adopted and adapted from German idealism.
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The second moment is where ‘Judaism “unplugs” from the polytheistic jouissance’.92 The multiplicity of gods and their obscene excessive enjoyment that is always too much for the mere humans, who are often only their playthings – which is what the Lacanian term ‘jouissance’ is indicating here – is replaced with one god. This is a step forward, Zizek claims, for ‘the Jewish–Christian openness to the Other’ is ‘thoroughly different from the pagan tribal hospitality’.93 For pagans, there is still a clear separation between their community and the Other outside it,94 whereas, in another use of ‘Hegelese’, ‘Jewish–Christian openness involves the logic of “positing its presuppositions”: it instigates us to remain open towards the Otherness which is experienced as such only within its own horizon.’95 For those still immersed in Judaism, however, the news is still not as good as it gets, for Jews ‘enact the necessity of a mediatory figure’, either in God or in external laws; ‘Jews focus on the rules to be followed, questions of “inner belief” are simply not raised.’96
On the one hand, Zizek does make some acute comments about the gentile fantasy of Jews as rootless cosmopolitans who stand for ‘universal- ity’, sometimes to be admired if not idealised, but who are also suspected as having no intrinsic loyalty to any other national community, which is where more potent forms of anti-semitism usually kick in. But he is drawn into these fantasies himself when he seems to want to divine what it really means to be a Jew in relation to God so he can evangelise about what it means to be a Christian. Jews, he says, are still faced with a God who is omnipotent and wrathful,97 which is why Zizek borrows from Saint Augustine to characterise Judaism as a ‘religion of Anxiety’ as opposed to the next new ‘religion of Love’.98
The third moment – and for Zizek this is the big one – is where ‘Christianity “unplugs” from one’s substantial community’.99 It is here that On Belief really gushes on the glory of Christ on the Cross. This is not a simple linear succession, but the ‘sublation’ – erasure, incorporation and improvement – of what went before. Hegel is once again summoned to bear witness, and we are told that he was ‘right to emphasize’ that ‘Judaism is the religion of the Sublime: it tries to render the suprasensible dimension
… but in a purely negative way, by renouncing images altogether’; ‘Christianity, however, renounces this God of Beyond, this Real behind the curtain of the phenomena’ so that there is nothing there except ‘an imper- ceptible X that changes Christ, this ordinary man, into God’.100 Thus ‘Christianity inverses the Jewish sublimation into a radical desublimation: not desublimation in the sense of the simple reduction of God to man, but desublimation in the sense of the descendence of the sublime beyond to the everyday level’.101 Now with direct and explicit reference to Christianity, it is ‘the impotent God who failed in his creation’102 who is the split
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Absolute subject in relation to which the Christians become split subjects: ‘the traumatic experience of God is also the enigma for God himself – our failure to comprehend God is what Hegel called a “reflexive determination” of the divine self-limitation’.103
The unplugging is not total, of course, because we cannot unplug ourselves from notions of unplugging. In fact, Zizek wants us to hold onto what we have unplugged ourselves from so that the ‘Judeo’ part of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition is conceptually and experientially assimilated. So, he argues that the ‘position to adopt between Judaism and Christianity is thus not simply to give preference to one of them, even less to opt for a kind of pseudo-dialectical “synthesis”’. The sting in the tail – the bad news about the difference between the realm of words and deeper truth – is that ‘as to the content of the belief, one should be a Jew, while retaining the Christian position of enunciation’.104 Remember that for this Hegelian the word is the murder of the thing, and truth arises through error. For Zizek it is fine to keep the reference to the Jewish God at the level of statements about God, but in the way of personally speaking as testimony to one’s relation to God – at the level of the position of enunciation – one should be Christian. That is the definitive ‘unplugging’ that will clear the way for a ‘new Beginning’ for each particular subject.
At the end of Tarrying with the Negative the eponymous Hegelian motif of ‘tarrying with the negative’ is rendered by Zizek into ‘our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the “non-existence of the Other”’.105 To consummate this act we will simultaneously be arriving at the purest end-point of philosophical inquiry.106 As a crucial part of this process we will also come to know that these questions have not been resolved, and this is also something to be approached at the end of Lacanian psychoanalysis for each individual subject. For Zizek, the philosophical and the psycho- analytic are intertwined, and his narrative switches back and forth between points of rupture in the history of philosophy and how individual subjects might clear their way through personal trauma. We will turn to psychoanaly- sis in more detail in the next chapter. There we will see how Lacan retrieves a commitment to Truth as contingent and particular, and is also able to reinstate Truth at a higher conceptual level as something universal in us as speaking subjects.
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