The Most Sublime Hysteric

The Most Sublime Hysteric

The Most Sublime Hysteric Hegel with Lacan Slavoj Žižek Translated by Thomas Scott-Railton polity

First published in French as Le plus sublime des hystériques. Hegel avec Lacan Presses Universitaires de France, 2011 This English edition Polity Press, 2014 This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme. Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6374-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6375-3(pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives PLC The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Contents Introduction: Impossible Absolute Knowledge 1 Book I: Hegel with Lacan 7 1. The Formal Aspect : Reason versus Understanding 9 2. The Retroactive Performative, or How the Necessary Emerges from the Contingent 21 3. The Dialectic as Logic of the Signifier (1): The One of Self-Reference 35 4. The Dialectic as Logic of the Signifier (2): The Real of the Triad 54 5. Das Ungeschehenmachen: How is Lacan a Hegelian? 70 6. The Cunning of Reason, or the True Nature of the Hegelian Teleology 83 7. The Suprasensible is the Phenomenon as Phenomenon, or How Hegel Goes Beyond the Kantian Thing-in-Itself 97

vi Contents 8. Two Hegelian Witz, Which Help Us Understand Why Absolute Knowledge Is Divisive 105 Book II: Post-Hegelian Impasses 125 9. The Secret of the Commodity Form: Why is Marx the Inventor of the Symptom? 127 10. Ideology Between the Dream and the Phantasy: A First Attempt at Defining Totalitarianism 146 11. Divine Psychosis, Political Psychosis: A Second Attempt at Defining Totalitarianism 156 12. Between Two Deaths: Third, and Final, Attempt at Defining Totalitarianism 175 13. The Quilting Point of Ideology: Or Why Lacan is Not a Poststructuralist 195 14. Naming and Contingency: Hegel and Analytic Philosophy 209 References 230 Index 236

Introduction: Impossible Absolute Knowledge Foucault once suggested that we define philosophy as such with anti- Platonism. Precisely because Plato was the thinker whose work cleared the ground for the field of philosophy, every philosopher, beginning with Aristotle, would define his project by distancing himself from Plato. In a similar way, we can think of philosophy in the last two centuries as defined by taking distance from Hegel. Hegel is the incarnation of the panlogical monster, the total dialectical mediation of reality, the total dissolution of reality in the self-movement of the Idea. Faced with this monster, various ideas have been advanced that would supposedly be capable of escaping the mediation of the concept. This procedure is already visible in the three great post-hegelian reversals that opposed the absolutism of the Idea in the name of the irrational abyss of the Will (Schelling), in the name of the paradox of individual existence (Kierkegaard), and in the name of the productive process of life (Marx). When siding with Hegel, even the most favorable commentators refuse to step over the line into accepting Absolute Knowledge. Thus, Jean Hyppolite emphasized that the post-hegelian experience permitted the irreducible opening of the historico-temporal process through an empty repetition that destroyed the framework of the progress of Reason. Even among partisans of Hegel, their relationship to the Hegelian system is always one of Of course, but still... of course Hegel affirmed the fundamentally antagonistic character of effectivity, the de-centering of the subject, etc., but still... ; this fissure is finally canceled through the self-mediation of the Absolute Idea that heals

2 Introduction all wounds. The position of Absolute Knowledge, of the final reconciliation, plays the role of the Hegelian Thing. It is the monster that is both frightening and ridiculous, from which one would do best to keep one s distance. It is both impossible (Absolute Knowledge is, of course, unattainable, an unrealizable Ideal!) and forbidden (Absolute Knowledge is terrifying, because it threatens mortification of all the richness of the living through the self-movement of the concept!). In other words, any identification with Hegelian thought implies a moment where this identification will break down the Thing must always be sacrificed. For us, this image of Hegel as panlogicist, devouring and mortifying the living substance of the particular, is the Real of his critics. Real in the Lacanian sense: the construction of a point that does not actually exist (a monster unrelated to Hegel himself) but that, nonetheless, must be presupposed in order to legitimate our position through negative reference to the other, by distancing ourselves. Where does this terror that grips the post-hegelians in the face of the monster of Absolute Knowledge come from? What is concealed in the fascinating presence of this phantasmic construction? A hole, an empty space. It is possible to define this hole by undertaking the reading of Hegel with Lacan, which is to say against the background of the Lacanian problematic of the lack in the Other, the traumatic emptiness around which the signifying process articulates itself. From this perspective, Absolute Knowledge reveals itself to be the Hegelian name for what Lacan attempted to pin down with the term the pass [la passe], the final moment of the analytical process, the experience of the Lack in the Other. If, according to Lacan s famous formulation, Sade gives us the truth of Kant, then Lacan himself could give us access to the fundamental matrix that gives the movement of the Hegelian dialectic its structure; Kant with Sade, Hegel with Lacan. What then is the relationship between Hegel and Lacan? Today, things seem clear-cut. While no one denies that Lacan owes a certain debt to Hegel, at the same time it is widely accepted that Hegel s influence was limited to certain theoretical borrowings, which occurred during a very fixed time frame. Between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, Lacan attempted to articulate the psychoanalytic process in the terms of the intersubjective logic of the recognition of desire and/or the desire for recognition. Already at this time, Lacan had taken care to distance himself from the closure of the Hegelian system, from the Absolute Knowledge that he associated with the inaccessible ideal of a perfectly homogenous discourse, complete and sealed in upon itself. Later on, the introduction of the logic of the

Impossible Absolute Knowledge 3 pas-tout * and the concept of the barred Other would render this initial reference to Hegel obsolete. Is it possible to imagine a more incompatible contradiction than between Hegelian Absolute Knowledge the sealed circle of circles and the Lacanian barred Other knowledge as irrevocably lacking? Is Lacan not the anti- Hegel par excellence? It is the critiques of Lacan in particular that bring out his debt to Hegel. Lacan has been criticized for remaining a prisoner of logophallocentrism, allegedly because of an underlying Hegelianism that confined textual dissemination within the teleological circle. In response to this critique, Lacanians reply, as they will, by drawing attention to Lacan s break with Hegelianism, struggling to save Lacan by emphasizing that he is not and was never a Hegelian. Now is the moment to take on this debate in a novel way, by articulating the relationship between Hegel and Lacan in an unprecedented manner. To my eyes, Lacan was fundamentally Hegelian, but did not know it. His Hegelianism is not to be found where we might expect it to be, in his overt references to Hegel, but rather in the final stage of his teachings, in the logic of the pas-tout, in the importance he placed on the Real, on the Lack in the Other. And, reciprocally, a reading of Hegel through the lens of Lacan gives us a picture of Hegel that is radically different from the commonly accepted view of him as a panlogicist. It will bring out a Hegel of the logic of the signifier, of a self-referential process articulated as the repeated positivation of a central Void. This reading changes the very definitions of the two terms involved. It washes away the alluvium of panlogicism and/or historicism and uncovers a Hegel of the logic of the signifier. On the other side, it makes it possible to isolate the most subversive of the core elements of Lacanian doctrine, that of the constitutive Lack in the Other. This is why this book is, at its roots, dialogical: it is impossible to develop a positive line of thinking without including the theses that are opposed to it. In this case, these are the commonplaces regarding Hegel that I ve already mentioned, which see Hegelianism as the quintessential example of the imperialism of reason, a closed economy in which the self-movement of the Concept sublates all the differences and dispersions of the material process. Similar commonplaces can be found in Lacan. But these are accompanied by a different conception of Hegel, one that is not found in Lacan s direct * Pas-tout is often translated as not-all or not-whole, and although the latter comes closer, it doesn t quite capture the meaning of the French original, which contains elements of both.

4 Introduction references to Hegel which is why I will, for the most part, ignore these references. In my reading, Lacan did not know where he was a Hegelian, because his reading of Hegel followed in the tradition of Kojève and Hyppolite. Therefore, in order to articulate the link between the logic of the dialectic and of the signifier, we must, for the time being, put aside all of Lacan s explicit references to Hegel. It seems that today the terms themselves of the philosophical debate have changed. The debate no longer draws on the poststructuralist themes of de-centering the subject, but rather on a kind of renewal of the Political (human rights, critiques of totalitarianism) through a theoretical return to a position that could generally be described, in its various different forms (up to and including Habermas s communicative ethics), as Kantian. This return to Kant has allowed for philosophy to be rehabilitated, rescuing it from symptomal readings that had reduced it to an ideological-imaginary effect and conferring a new credibility on philosophical reflection, while still avoiding the totalitarianism of Reason (which it identifies with post-kantian idealism), which is to say, while still keeping the horizon of historical progress open. And so, the second part of this work will develop an implicit dialogue with this point of view, at several levels, through references to three fields of philosophy. First of all, the Kantian field itself. Starting with Lacan, I will describe the dimension of Kant that has not figured in the renewal of his thinking, the Kant whose truth is Sade, the Kant whose impossible superego imperative hides the injunction to jouissance, * the Kant who was radicalized by Schelling in his theory of original Evil. Second, owing to the influence of the return to Kantian philosophy, Marx has been largely forgotten. What can we salvage from Marx after the experience of totalitarianism? There remains the man who invented the symptom (as Lacan argued in the RSI seminar), who can help us understand the fundamentally unconscious nature of ideology, the relationship of the symptom to the fantasy, and so on. Third, according to received doxa, analytic philosophy is the radical opposite of Hegel. However, I will argue that this novel understanding of the core of the Hegelian dialectic is more present in certain strains of analytic philosophy (Kripke s anti-descriptivism, for example) than it is in the different versions of straight Hegelianism. * Although it could be roughly translated as enjoyment, jouissance is a more specific term with a sexual connotation. For a more in-depth discussion of how to translate the term, see Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2002), p. 150. Evans defines jouissance as an excessive quantity of excitation which the pleasure principle attempts to prevent.

Impossible Absolute Knowledge 5 Using this three-part dialogue as its base, the second part of this book will sketch the outlines of a Lacanian theory of the politicoideological field that will allow us to diagnose the phenomenon that has been labeled totalitarian, while at the same time pinning down the fundamentally paradoxical nature of democracy. The final thesis of this book is that Lacanian doctrine contains the framework for a theory of the politico-ideological field. This framework has not been fully fleshed out, and this is one of the great enigmas of contemporary thought. Perhaps the solution to this great enigma coincides with the solution of another: why has the true character of Lacan s Hegelianism been consistently misrecognized? * This book presents the re-edited text of the doctoral thesis Philosophy Between the Symptom and the Fantasy, completed under the direction of Jacques-Alain Miller and defended in November 1982 in the Psychoanalysis Department of the Université de Paris-VIII. I extend my thanks to Professor Miller and other colleagues in the Freudian field who provided their support for this work. * I have generally translated méconnaissance (literally mis-knowledge) as misrecognition, and also once or twice as misunderstanding, depending on the context. Although it is often left untranslated, it seems not to lose anything essential in its translation. For a more in-depth discussion, see Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, p. 112.

Book I Hegel with Lacan