First published by Verso 2012 © Slavoj Žižek All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books eISBN‐13: 978‐1‐84467‐902‐7 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Zizek, Slavoj. Less than nothing : Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism by Slavoj Zizek. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978‐1‐84467‐897‐6 ‐‐ ISBN 978‐1‐84467‐889‐1 (ebook) 1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770‐1831. I. Title. B2948.Z55 2012 193‐‐dc23 2011050465 Typeset in Minion Pro by MJ Gavan, Cornwall, UK Printed by in the US by Maple Vail To Alenka and Mladen—because die Partei hat immer Recht. Contents Introduction: Eppur Si Muove PART I. THE DRINK BEFORE 1 “Vacillating the Semblances” What cannot be said must be shown Idea’s appearing From fictions to semblances Dialectical gymnastics? No, thanks! From the One to den “Nothing exists” Gorgias, not Plato, was the arch‐Stalinist! 2 “Where There Is Nothing, Read That I Love You” A Christian Tragedy? The big Other The death of God The atheist wager “Do not compromise your desire” Lacan against Buddhism 3 Fichte’s Choice From Fichte’s Ich to Hegel’s Subject The Fichtean wager Anstoss and Tat‐Handlung Division and limitation The finite Absolute The posited presupposition The Fichtean bone in the throat The first modern theology PART II. THE THING ITSELF: HEGEL 4 Is It Still Possible to Be a Hegelian Today? Hegel versus Nietzsche Struggle and reconciliation A story to tell Changing the destiny The owl of Minerva Potentiality versus virtuality The Hegelian circle of circles Interlude 1: Marx as a Reader of Hegel, Hegel as a Reader of Marx 5 Parataxis: Figures of the Dialectical Process In praise of Understanding Phenomena, noumena, and the limit The differend Negation of the negation Form and content Negation without a filling Interlude 2: Cogito in the History of Madness 6 “Not Only as Substance, but Also as Subject” Concrete universality Hegel, Spinoza … and Hitchcock The Hegelian Subject Absolute Knowing The Idea’s constipation? The animal that I am Interlude 3: King, Rabble, War … and Sex 7 The Limits of Hegel A List Necessity as self‐sublated contingency Varieties of self‐relating negation The formal aspect Aufhebung and repetition From repetition to drive PART III. THE THING ITSELF: LACAN 8 Lacan as a Reader of Hegel The Cunning of Reason The Lacanian prosopopoeia Lacan, Marx, Heidegger The “magical force” of reversal Reflection and supposition Beyond intersubjectivity Drive versus Will The unconscious of self‐consciousness Interlude 4: Borrowing from the Future, Changing the Past 9 Suture and Pure Difference From differentiality to the phallic signifier From the phallic signifier to objet a Sibelius’s silence The pure difference Interlude 5: Correlationism and Its Discontents 10 Objects, Objects Everywhere Subtraction, protraction, obstruction … destruction The objet a between form and content Voice and gaze The grandmother’s voice The Master and its specter The two sides of fantasy Image and gaze Presence “The picture is in my eye, but me, I am in the picture” Leave the screen empty! Interlude 6: Cognitivism and the Loop of Self‐Positing 11 The Non‐All, or, the Ontology of Sexual Difference Sexual difference in the disenchanted universe The real of sexual difference Formulae of sexuation: the All with an exception Formulae of sexuation: the non‐All The antinomies of sexual difference Why Lacan is not a nominalist Negation of the negation: Lacan versus Hegel? “There is a non‐relationship” PART IV. THE CIGARETTE AFTER 12 The Foursome of Terror, Anxiety, Courage … and Enthusiasm Being/World/Event Truth, inconsistency, and the symptomal point There is no human animal Badiou against Levinas From terror to enthusiasm Badiou and antiphilosophy 13 The Foursome of Struggle, Historicity, Will … and Gelassenheit Why Lacan is not a Heideggerian Hegel versus Heidegger The torture‐house of language An alternative Heidegger From will to drive The non‐historical core of historicity From Gelassenheit to class struggle 14 The Ontology of Quantum Physics The ontological problem Knowledge in the Real Agential realism The two vacuums Y’a de den Conclusion: The Political Suspension of the Ethical Introduction: Eppur Si Muove There are two opposed types of stupidity. The first is the (occasionally) hyper‐intelligent subject who just doesn’t “get it,” who understands a situation logically, but simply misses its hidden contextual rules. For example, when I first visited New York, a waiter at a café asked me: “How was your day?” Mistaking the phrase for a genuine question, I answered him truthfully (“I am dead tired, jet‐lagged, stressed out …”), and he looked at me as if I were a complete idiot … and he was right: this kind of stupidity is precisely that of an idiot. Alan Turing was an exemplary idiot: a man of extraordinary intelligence, but a proto‐psychotic unable to process implicit contextual rules. In literature, one cannot avoid recalling Jaroslav Hašek’s good soldier Švejk, who, when he saw soldiers shooting from their trenches at the enemy soldiers, ran into no‐man’s land and started to shout: “Stop shooting, there are people on the other side!” The arch‐model of this idiocy is, however, the naïve child from Andersen’s tale who publicly exclaims that the emperor is naked—thereby missing the point that, as Alphonse Allais put it, we are all naked beneath our clothes. The second and opposite figure of stupidity is that of the moron: the stupidity of those who fully identify with common sense, who fully stand for the “big Other” of appearances. In the long series of figures beginning with the Chorus in Greek tragedy—which plays the role of canned laughter or crying, always ready to comment on the action with some common wisdom—one should mention at least the “stupid” common‐sense partners of the great detectives: Sherlock Holmes’s Watson, Hercule Poirot’s Hastings … These figures are there not only to serve as a contrast to and thus make more visible the detective’s grandeur; they are indispensable for the detective’s work. In one of the novels, Poirot explains to Hastings his role: immersed in his common sense, Hastings reacts to the crime scene the way the murderer who wanted to erase the traces of his act expected the public to react, and it is only in this way, by including in his analysis the expected reaction of the common‐sense “big Other,” that the detective can solve the crime. But does this opposition cover the entire field? Where, for instance, are we to put Franz Kafka, whose greatness resides (among other things) in his unique ability to present idiocy as something entirely normal and conventional? (Recall the extravagantly “idiotic” reasoning in the long debate between the priest and Josef K. which follows the parable “Before the Law.”) For this third position, we need look no further than the Wikipedia entry for “imbecile”: “Imbecile is a term for moderate to severe mental retardation, as well as for a type of criminal. It arises from the Latin word imbecillus, meaning weak, or weak‐minded. ‘Imbecile’ was once applied to people with an IQ of 26–50, between ‘moron’ (IQ of 51–70) and ‘idiot’ (IQ 0–25).” So it is not too bad: beneath a moron, but ahead of an idiot—the situation is catastrophic, but not serious, as (who else?) an Austrian imbecile would have put it. Problems begin with the question: where does the root “becile” preceded by the negation (“im‐”) come from? Although the origins are murky, it is probably derived from the Latin baculum (stick, walking stick, staff), so an “imbecile” is someone walking around without the help of a stick. One can bring some clarity and logic into the issue if one conceives of the stick on which we all, as speaking beings, have to lean, as language, the symbolic order, that is, what Lacan calls the “big Other.” In this case, the tripartite idiot‐imbecile‐moron makes sense: the idiot is simply alone, outside the big Other, the moron is within it (dwelling in language in a stupid way), while the imbecile is in between the two—aware of the need for the big Other, but not relying on it, distrusting it, something like the way the Slovene punk group Laibach defined their relationship towards God (and referring to the words on a dollar bill “In God we trust”): “Like Americans, we believe in God, but unlike Americans, we don’t trust him.” In Lacanese, an imbecile is aware that the big Other does not exist, that it is inconsistent, “barred.” So if, measured by the IQ scale, the moron appears brighter than the imbecile, he is too bright for his own good (as reactionary morons, but not imbeciles, like to say about intellectuals). Among the philosophers, the late Wittgenstein is an imbecile par excellence, obsessively dealing with variations of the question of the big Other: is there an agency which guarantees the consistency of our speech? Can we reach certainty about the rules of our speech? Does not Lacan aim at the same position of the (im)becile when he concludes his “Vers un signifiant nouveau” with: “I am only relatively stupid—that is to say, I am as stupid as all people—perhaps because I got a little bit enlightened”?1 One should read this relativization of stupidity—“not totally stupid”—in the strict sense of non‐All: the point is not that Lacan has some specific insights which make him not entirely stupid. There is nothing in Lacan which is not stupid, no exception to stupidity, so that what makes him not totally stupid is only the very inconsistency of his stupidity. The name of this stupidity in which all people participate is, of course, the big Other. In a conversation with Edgar Snow in the early 1970s, Mao Zedong characterized himself as a hairless monk with an umbrella. Holding an umbrella hints at the separation from heaven, and, in Chinese, the character for “hair” also designates law and heaven, so that what Mao is saying is that—in Lacanese—he is subtracted from the dimension of the big Other, the heavenly order which regulates the normal run of things. What makes this self‐designation paradoxical is that Mao still designates himself as a monk (a monk is usually perceived as someone who, precisely, dedicates his life to heaven)—so how can one be a monk subtracted from heaven? This “imbecility” is the core of the subjective position of a radical revolutionary (and of the analyst). The present book is thus neither The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Hegel, nor is it yet another university textbook on Hegel (which would be for morons, of course); it is something like The Imbecile’s Guide to Hegel—Hegel for those whose IQ is somewhere close to their bodily temperature (in Celsius), as the insult goes. But only something like it: the problem with “imbeciles” is that none of us, as ordinary speakers, knows what the “im” negates: we know what “imbecile” means, but we don’t know what “becile” is—we simply suspect that it must somehow be the opposite of “imbecile.”2 But what if, here too, persists the mysterious tendency for antonyms (such as heimlich and unheimlich—about which Freud wrote a famous short text) to mean the same thing? What if “becile” is the same as “imbecile,” only with an additional twist? In our daily use, “becile” does not stand on its own, it functions as a negation of “imbecile,” so that, insofar as “imbecile” already is a negation of a kind, “becile” must be a negation of negation—but, and this is crucial, this double negation does not bring us back to some primordial positivity. If an “imbecile” is one who lacks a substantial basis in the big Other, a “becile” redoubles the lack, transposing it into the Other itself. The becile is a not‐imbecile, aware that if he is an imbecile, God himself also has to be one. So what does a becile know that idiots and morons don’t? The legend has it that, in 1633, Galileo Galilei muttered, “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves”), after recanting before the Inquisition his theory that the Earth moves around the Sun: he was not tortured, it was