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i or He or it, the thing . . . that Dies: Death and the Euthanasia of Reason As early as The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek employs the language of psychoanalytic psychopathology in “diagnosing” the shortcomings of the Kantian critical-transcendental framework. He repeatedly refers to Kant’s thought as exhibiting features identical to patterns displayed by obsessional neurosis: “What is at stake in Kant’s ‘obsessional’ economy is precisely the avoidance of the traumatic encounter of the Truth . . . it announces a desire to elude, at any price, an encounter with the Truth” (Žižek 1989, 190). Elsewhere, he states that “Kant, like a good compulsive neurotic . . . sets up the network of the conditions of possible experience in order to make sure that the actual experience of the real, the encounter with the Thing, will never take place, so that everything the subject will effectively encounter will be the already gentrified -domesticated reality of representations” (Žižek 1996b, 75). But what is this horrible, terrifying “Truth” that so frightens Kant as to push him into designing an incredibly sophisticated philosophical system as an elaborate defense mechanism for warding off a confrontation with it? What is the “traumatic encounter” that Kant allegedly struggles with all his intellectual might to avoid? According to Žižek, the noumenalphenomenal distinction “conceals a foreboding that perhaps this Thing is itself nothing but a lack, an empty place” (Žižek 1989, 193). Along these same lines, Žižek speaks of “the monstrous noumenal Thing,” an abyss or vacuum threatening to swallow up the subject that fails to maintain an appropriate degree of distance from it.1 In fact, this sort of descriptive language is regularly employed with regard to the theme of subjectivity as negativity: Žižek depicts Descartes’ cogito as a “monster,”2 and he repeatedly cites the young Hegel’s macabre image of the subject as a dark and ominous night in which the body appears in a state of gruesome, butchered fragmentation.3 Additionally, it should be observed, in the paragraph of the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit from which Žižek extracts the phrase “tarrying with the negative,” that Hegel associates this negativity with death, with “devastation” and “utter dismemberment.”4 Could this Hegelian connotation of negativity hold the key to illuminating Žižek’s otherwise strange and perplexing 3 21 characterizations of the Cartesian-Kantian subject (and by implication, the Lacanian $) as a horribly monstrous, spectral “creature from the abyss,” as a traumatic lack or terrifying emptiness, the “thing from inner space”?5 Could it be that the void skirted around by Kant is rendered disturbing by virtue of being, behind the concealing layers of philosophicalepistemological abstraction—Kant doesn’t speak of the unimaginable subject-in-itself as anything more tangible than an ineffable, unknowable noumenon—an emblem or avatar of ontological finitude (specifically as the mortality inextricably intertwined with the individual’s corporeal condition)? Is this the hidden link between epistemological and ontological finitude testified to by what Žižek psychoanalytically identifies as Kant’s “obsessional neurotic” desperation to, as it were, avoid the void? Is this awful nothingness somehow related to the absence of annihilation ? Speaking of the Hegelian “night of the world,” Žižek claims that death itself stands for this “self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its links with ‘reality’” (Žižek 1999b, 154). What if the inverse is (also) true? What if the negativity of CartesianKantian -Hegelian subjectivity (as the monstrous cogito, the horrible void of the Thing, and the terrifying abyss of nocturnal dismemberment) is a symptomatic ideality-as-idealization derived from and conditioned by a contingent yet a priori material foundation (what, in psychoanalysis, would be designated as a violent “reaction-formation”)?6 Is the subject-asnegativity a response to its corporeal Grund (ground), to a primordially chaotic and discordant Real that produces its own negation immanently out of itself? Are Žižek’s otherwise inexplicably odd choices of adjectives here indicative of such a link, of a thinly concealed umbilical cord tethering the (pseudo)immateriality of the modern subject to a dark base rendered obscure through a forceful disavowal/abjection? Before attempting to answer these pressing questions, a few relevant observations ought to be put forward here. In his crucial metapsychological paper “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), Freud draws a distinction between “ego-libido” (i.e., narcissistically invested libido) and “object-libido” (i.e., anaclitically invested libido), these two forms of libidinal cathexis being related to each other in...

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