Toward a Notion of Critical Self-Creation: Slavoj Zizek and the "Vortex of Madness"

To examine the process of critical self-creation illustrated by Slavoj Zizek, I am content to begin where he begins: with the problem of Beginning itself. As he observes in The Indivisible Remainder—a reading of F. W. J. von Schelling’s unfinished masterpiece on the Creation, The Ages of the World [Die Weltalter]—it is the crucial problem of German Idealism. ¹ I, however, will complicate this question of beginnings even further by asking, how is it that one gives birth to oneself as a critical subject? How does one self-create? In the case of Zizek, the critical subject never quite does emerge, but remains trapped in an endless cycle of birth contractions (and expansions) which expose the Real of the struggle involved in any act of self-assertion. Like others, such as his mentor Jacques Lacan, he assumes a theoretical stance which sets out to transgress boundaries between philosophy, psychology, literature, politics, film, and popular culture. ² But where Zizek is unique, and where he makes his radical break with other literary theorists who take up a position, any position at all that pretends to some notional content or critical truth, is in the fact that he fundamentally has no position. His recent outpouring of critical texts—ranging from ideologico-psychological film theory, such as Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), to the politico-philosophical Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (matters which include, and why not, quantum physics)—describes a hybridized critical identity that is almost impossible to pin down. Rather than importing interdisciplinary texts and events to his own theoretical perspective, he functions as a “vanishing mediator,” mediating between various theoretical points of view.

His effort to unite these a priori categories into an “ideological theory” (à la the Kantian transcendental object) seems targeted toward positing himself as an “ideologist,” opening the possibility for a “field of ideology,” and thus raising the stakes of his own critical self-creation further. For while the concept of “ideology” itself has had a long and complicated genealogy, ³ the concept of an “ideologist” is something relatively (if not completely) new. Critics have traditionally “handled” ideology from within particular disciplines such as literary studies, sociology, political science, and so forth. To posit oneself as an “ideologist” is a sufficiently original move that it warrants attention, particularly as regards the process of critical self-creation. Zizek’s feverish productivity over recent years, far from expounding the substantial content of his critical self, can be read as a desperate quest to fill the gap—in Schellingian terms, the “void”—at the center of his persona, and each new critical endeavor, each book, proves only the absence of any critical truth to be had. It almost seems that the more he writes, the more he undermines the substance of “theory.” Like Lacan, who crossbreeds psychoanalysis with philosophy, linguistics, and literature, Zizek shifts from a psychological lens to analyze politico-cultural events, for example, (the hyphenation being part of the game) to a Marxist-Hegelian lens to analyze theosophy. While such shifts may be read as theoretical evasion, I will borrow a Zizekian maneuver to argue the contrary: his subjective transparency is precisely his point.

In order to understand how the “void” functions at the heart of Zizek’s critical self, giving rise to and at the same time undermining each theoretical structure he erects (always with borrowed tools) it will be useful to examine how he adapts this model from Schelling. The Indivisible Remainder is Zizek’s attempt to explicate the creation drama narrated by Schelling as “Ages of the World” in three unfinished drafts of Weltalter. His effort to come to terms with Schelling’s notion of how the Absolute posits himself and thereby posits the universe is partially intended as a theoretical coup, an attempt to plunder a major text of German Idealism for the materialist camp and rename it as “one of the seminal works of materialism” (IR 7). Unlike Schelling’s precursor J. G. Fichte, known for his notion of the...