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The Immanence of Transcendence: From Kant to Hegel At the end of an interview conducted in September 2003, Žižek declares that “ultimately if I am to choose just one thinker, it’s Hegel. He’s the one for me” (Žižek 2003a). Elsewhere, he concedes that “even when I try at times to be critical of Hegel, I remain Hegelian” (Žižek and Daly 2004, 63). There are about as many references to Hegel scattered throughout Žižek’s corpus as there are to Lacan. As already noted, Žižek insists again and again that the core of his project consists in the redeployment of a German idealist theory of subjectivity revised in being passed through the lens of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology. However , the majority of extant commentaries on his work either ignore the foundational role of late modern philosophy therein—in Astra Taylor’s documentary film on him (Žižek! The Movie [2005], produced by the Documentary Campaign), Žižek complains, “That part of the message doesn’t get through” because his audience prefers to dwell primarily on the cultural and political dimensions of his writings—or else, if the philosophical component of the Žižekian oeuvre is addressed, it’s almost always Hegel who is the center of exegetical attention. That is to say, for whatever reasons, Kant and Schelling, two of Hegel’s contemporaneous principal interlocutors as well as sources of abundant theoretical inspiration for Žižek himself, tend to be passed over in relative silence. Adequately understanding Žižek’s relation to Hegel (and consequently the Žižekian project tout court) is simply impossible in the absence of a thorough delineation of the multiple ménage à trois scenarios that transpire in his texts between three hybrid entities: Kant-Žižek, Schelling-Žižek, and Hegel-Žižek (with Lacan as a floating fourth circulating among these three). In fact, at the very moment in the same 2003 interview when he proclaims his fidelity to Hegel as absolutely central to his endeavors, Žižek makes three other points worth highlighting: If you were to ask me at gunpoint, like Hollywood producers who are too stupid to read books and say, “give me the punchline,” and were to demand, “Three sentences. What are you really trying to do?” I would say, Screw ideology. Screw movie analyses. What really interests me is the 11 125 following insight: if you look at the very core of psychoanalytic theory, of which even Freud was not aware, it’s properly read death drive—this idea of beyond the pleasure principle, self-sabotaging, etc.—the only way to read this properly is to read it against the background of the notion of subjectivity as self-relating negativity in German Idealism. That is to say, I take literally Lacan’s indication that the subject of psychoanalysis is the Cartesian cogito—of course, I would add, as reread by Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. I am here very old fashioned. I still think that basically this— the problematic of radical evil and so on—is philosophy, and all the rest is a footnote. (Žižek 2003a) After briefly summarizing his interpretation of the conceptual movement connecting Kant, Schelling, and Hegel (as well as noting that “Hegel didn’t know what he was doing. You have to interpret him”), Žižek continues: I’m trying to do what Deleuze forgot to do—to bugger Hegel, with Lacan . . . so that you get monstrous Hegel . . . It’s a very technical, modest project, but I believe in it. All other things are negotiable. I don’t care about them. You can take movies from me, you can take everything. You cannot take this from me . . . What really interests me is philosophy, and for me, psychoanalysis is ultimately a tool to reactualize, to render actual for today’s time, the legacy of German Idealism. (Žižek 2003a) First, Žižek unambiguously maintains that the cultural and political features of his corpus are of less interest to him in comparison with the utilization of psychoanalysis as a device for updating German idealism. Second, it’s evident from these remarks (as from many others of a similar sort) that Hegel is handled by Žižek as part of a sequence involving Kant and Schelling, a sequence tied together through Lacan’s analytic appropriation of the depiction of subjectivity first delineated by Descartes. Third—this point, as will be seen, is linked to the previous one—Žižek states that his philosophical...

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