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the Night of the World: the Vanishing Mediator Between Nature and Culture Žižek credits Kant not only with being the first philosopher, strictly speaking —recallthathepinpointsphilosophyastrulybeginningwiththeKantian transcendental turn (see chapter 2)—but also with being the foundational thinker of human autonomy, which is itself one of the principal concerns of philosophy.1 And yet Žižek sees Kant as averting his gaze after peering into the abyss of freedom, of covering over what he glimpses of this rupture of negativity disrupting the supposed consistency of being. In the domains of both the phenomenal and the noumenal, the Kantian subject appears to be a wholly determined entity devoid of autonomy. Phenomenal subjectivity amounts to the individual as inserted into the cause-and-effect chains of freedomless natural mechanisms. Moreover, Kant speculates that noumenal subjectivity, if directly accessed by reflective self-consciousness (an access he deems impossible), would manifest itselfasthe“awfulmajesty”(furchtbarenMajestät—thisistheprecisephrase used in the Critique of Practical Reason) of a terrible Thing also bereft of agency (as a mere node in a divine network, a network akin to Spinoza’s God-substance). The insinuation here is that the subject’s ignorance of its inaccessible noumenal essence sustains what might well be an illusory freedom which doesn’t exist at the brute ontological level. For Kant, phenomenal reality is partial and incomplete, a field of fragmentary experience constrained by the limits constitutive of the finite subject. By contrast, the noumenal Real of being an sich is presumed to be whole and complete, entirely at one with itself in its internal self-consistency. Although it sometimes sounds as though Kant associates transcendental autonomy with the noumenal essence of the subject-Thing, Žižek insists that there is no room for subjective freedom within the confines of the stifling ontological closure of Kant’s being-in-itself: “When we imagine the Whole of reality, there is no longer any place for consciousness (and subjectivity). There are two options here: either subjectivity is an illusion, or reality is in itself (not only epistemologically) not-All” (Žižek 2006, 168). Žižek’s Hegel takes the latter path, opting to posit the “not-all-ness” of being—and therefore leaving open the possibility for an actually au13 178 tonomous non-epiphenomenal subjectivity. This Hegelian move, Žižek argues, is the only way to leave open this possibility.2 And Žižek makes several more moves of his own apropos this topic. He occasionally claims that the freedom of the subject-as-$ is to be located in the “parallax gap” between the noumenal and phenomenal planes, that subjective autonomy is somehow sustained by the disjunction between these strata.3 At other times, with an inflection more obviously in line with the general thrust of his Hegelianism, he proposes that “noumenal Freedom is nothing but a rupture within phenomenal reality” (Žižek 1999b, 86), rather than that this freedom subsists within a second-order region of being, such as Kant’s noumenal sphere (for Hegel-Žižek, “this is it,” that is, there is no “other scene” utterly apart from the here and now of less than harmonious phenomenal reality). Viewed from a Hegelian-Žižekian perspective , Kant’s picture of a horrible, heteronomous noumenal Real, a domain of substantial being in which everything is determined, is nothing more than a fantasy, an imaginary regression to a pre-critical Spinozism , obfuscating the ultimate inconsistency of Real being itself (and hence occluding the subject-as-$, too).4 Žižek explains: Hegel . . . rejects Kant’s vision of a man who, because of his direct insight into the monstrosity of the divine Being-in-itself, would turn into a lifeless puppet: such a vision is meaningless and inconsistent, since . . . it secretly reintroduces the ontologically fully constituted divine totality: a world conceived only as Substance, not also as Subject. For Hegel, the fantasy of such a transformation of man into a lifeless puppet-instrument of the monstrous divine Will (or whim), horrible as it may appear, already signals the retreat from the true monstrosity, which is that of the abyss of freedom, of the “night of the world.” What Hegel does is thus to “traverse” this fantasy by demonstrating its function of filling in the pre-ontological abyss of freedom—that is, by reconstituting the positive Scene in which the subject is inserted into a positive noumenal order. (Žižek 1999b, 61) Proposed in condensed form, the claim here is that solely through “barring ” the Real of the substance of...

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