Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity

Substance as Subject: The Self-Sundering of Being

Substance as Subject: The Self-Sundering of Being In his 1974 televised interview, Lacan describes (Imaginary-Symbolic) reality as “a grimace of the real.”1 Žižek reverses this description: the Real is a grimace of reality.2 He implies that Lacan’s 1974 formulation remains too Kantian: it hints that there is an inaccessible dimension (i.e., the noumenal Real) which can only ever be approached asymptotically through the distorting mediation of superficial appearances (i.e., phenomenal Imaginary-Symbolic reality). From the very beginning, Žižek’s work has concerned itself with explicating Lacanian theory vis-à-vis German idealism and vice versa. In particular, his elucidations of Lacan’s register of the Real are inextricably intertwined with his interpretations of the previously mentioned controversies traversing the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. For the past few years, the self-critical story Žižek tells in narrating the development of his theorizing involves the claim that early texts such as The Sublime Object of Ideology too closely link the Lacanian Real with the problematic Kantian thing-in-itself. He characterizes his changes of mind regarding the Real as amounting to his own traversal of the path leading from Kant to Hegel in the way sketched above (even though, as has been argued already, Žižek is often more Schellingian than Hegelian; additionally, as will be argued, Žižek’s subtler depictions of the Real also bring him into proximity with, somewhat surprisingly, Fichte). Accordingly, in, for instance, both his Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (2002) and The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), he calls for an abandonment of the conceptualization of the Real as a substantial excess lying outside the boundaries of Imaginary-Symbolic reality.3 However, through his successive (re-)elaborations of the fashions in which Kant and post-Kantian German idealism clarify the status of various aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Žižek manages to raise serious doubts in the mind of the attentive reader as to whether his specifications concerning the Real are fundamentally consistent, and, if so, whether they’re consistent in the manner he consciously believes them to be as per his selfreflexive narration of his own theoretical “progress” from a Kantian to a Hegelian Real. Many problems are the result of his somewhat haphazardly alternating between and conflating static versus genetic analyses of 12 145 the Real (i.e., the Real as it is in relation to the already constituted subject situated in Imaginary-Symbolic reality versus the Real as it is in relation to the formative genesis of both the subject and reality). To begin with, one could claim that, as regards the ontology of the Real, Žižek consistently has oscillated between Kantian and Hegelian positions starting with some of his earliest texts. As ought to be crystal clear by now, he tends to align Lacan’s distinction between the Real and reality—the latter is constituted on the basis of the registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic—with the Kantian dichotomy between the noumenal and the phenomenal respectively (if only to undermine this alignment in the course of revealing the Hegelian dialectical subtlety of Lacanian thought). Here, the Kantian version of the Real would entail presupposing the existence of some substantial thing-in-itself enjoying an ontological status entirely independent of Imaginary-Symbolic reality and its world of re/presentations. Correlatively, the Hegelian version of the Real would amount to asserting that this X defying representation and eluding symbolization is always posited from within the framework of Imaginary-Symbolic reality. So—this is the fundamental question regarding philosophical idealism—is the Real transcendent or immanent with respect to reality? Although Žižek usually sounds quite decisive when answering this basic query—during the past several years, he has come to insist upon the immanence of the Real to reality—the details of his various expositions of the relations between late modern philosophy and Lacan’s doctrine of the three registers betray a certain indecisiveness , an indecisiveness that deserves to be highlighted, thematized, and preserved (and not quickly resolved in favor of either a Kantian or Hegelian depiction of the Real). Žižek’s ontology of the Real is neither Kantian nor Hegelian, although significantly influenced by both thinkers (as observed, if anything, it’s closer to Fichte and Schelling, the two intermediary figures between Kant and Hegel). Beginning with his first publications, Žižek characterizes the Lacanian Real, with reference to Hegel, as exhibiting a dialectical coincidence of...