Slavoj Žižek - Sublime Object of Ideology lyrics

Preface to the New Edition: The Idea's Constipation? When a discipline is in crisis, attempts are made to change or supplement its theses within the terms of its basic framework - a procedure one might call 'Ptolemization' (since when data poured in which clashed with Ptolemy's earth-centred astronomy, his partisans introduced additional complications to account for the anomalies). But the true 'Copernican' revolution takes place when, instead of just adding complications and changing minor premises, the basic framework itself undergoes a transformation. So, when we are dealing with a self-professed 'scientific revolution', the question to ask is always: is this truly a Copernican revolution, or merely a Ptolemization of the old paradigm? Two examples ofPtolemization: there are good reasons to claim that 'string theory', which claims to provide the foundations for a unified theory (a single theoretical framework describing the four fundamental interactions between subatomic particles that were previously explained separately by relativity theory or quantum physics), remains an attempt at P tolemization, and that we are still waiting for a new beginning which will require an even more radical change in the basic presuppositions (something like abandoning time or space as the basic constituent of reality).' Likewise, in social theory, there are good reasons to claim that 1 See Lee Smolin, 'The 'Trouble with pI!JISlCs New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. PREFACE all the 'new paradigm' proposals about the nature of the contemporary world (that we are entering a post-industrial society, a postmodern society, a risk society, an informational society . . . ) remain so many Ptolemizations of the 'old paradigm' of cla**ic sociological models. The question is then: how do things stand with psychoan*lysis? Although F reud presented his discovery as a Copernican revolution, the fundamental premise of the cognitive sciences is that psychoan*lysis remains a 'Ptolemization' of cla**ical psychology, failing to abandon its most basic premises. (Post-cla**ical economists, incidentally, make the same claim about Marx: his critique of Smith and Ricardo amounts to a Ptolemization.) The Sublime Object o/"Ideology tries to answer this question by way of rehabilitating psychoan*lysis in its philosophical core - as a theory indebted to Hegel's dialectics and readable only against this background. This cannot but appear, perhaps, as the worst possible move to have made: trying to save psychoan*lysis, a discredited theory (and practice), by reference to an even more discredited theory, the worst kind of speculative philosophy rendered irrelevant by the progress of modern Science. However, as Lacan taught us, when we are confronted with an apparently clear choice, sometimes the correct thing to do is choose the worst option. Thus my wager was (and is) that, through their interaction (reading Hegel through Lacan and vice versa), psychoan*lysis and Hegelian dialectics may simultaneously redeem themselves, shedding their old skins and emerging in a new unexpected shape. Let us take Hegel's dialectics at its most 'idealist' - with the notion of the sublation of all immediate-material reality. The fundamental operation is reduction: the sublated thing survives, but in an 'abridged' edition, as it were, torn out of its life-world context, stripped down to its essential features, all the movement and wealth of its life reduced to a fixed mark. It is not that, after the abstraction of Reason has done its mortifying job with its fixed categories or notional determinations, speculative 'concrete universality' somehow returns us to the fresh greenness of Life; rather, once we pa** from empirical reality to its notional Azifhebung, the immediacy of Life is lost forever. There is nothing more foreign to Hegel than a lamentation for the richness of reality that gets lost when we proceed to its conceptual grasp. Recall Hegel's unambiguous celebration of the absolute power of Understanding from his Foreword to the Phenomenology: 'The action of separating the elements is the exercise of the force of Understanding, the most astonishing and greatest of all powers, or rather the absolute power.' This celebration is in no way qualified; that is, Hegel's point is that this power is nonetheless later 'sublated' into a subordinate moment of the unifying totality of Reason. The problem with Understanding is, rather, that it does not unleash this power to the end, that it takes it as external to the thing itself-hence the standard notion that it is merely our Understanding ('mind') that separates in its imagination what in 'reality' belongs together, so that the Understanding's 'absolute power' is merely the power of our imagination, which in no way concerns the reality of the thing so an*lysed. We pa** from Understanding to Reason not when this an*lysis, or tearing apart, is overcome in a synthesis that brings us back to the wealth of reality, but when this power of 'tearing apart' is displaced from being 'merely in our mind' into things themselves, as their inherent power of negativity. Back in the 1960s, one 'progressive' theorist of education touched a chord when he published the results of a simple experiment: he asked a group of five-year-olds to draw an image of themselves playing at home; then, he asked the same group to do it again two years later, after they had been through a year and a half of primary school. The difference was striking: the self-portraits of the five-year-olds were exuberant, lively, full of colours, surrealistically playful; two years later, the portraits were much more rigid and subdued, with a large majority of the children spontaneously choosing only the grey of the ordinary pencil, although other colors were at their disposal. predictably, this experiment was taken as proof of the 'oppressiveness' of the school apparatus, of how the drill and discipline of school squash children's spontaneous creativity, and so on and so forth. From a Hegelian standpoint, however, one should, on the contrary, celebrate this shift as an indication of crucial spiritual x PREFACE progress: nothing is lost in this reduction of lively colorfulness to grey discipline; in fact, everything is gained - the power of the spirit is precisely to progress from the 'green' immediacy of life to its 'grey' conceptual structure, and to reproduce in this reduced medium the essential determinations to which our immediate experience blinds us. The same mortification occurs in historical memory and monuments of the past where what survive are objects deprived of their living souls. Here is Hegel's comment apropos Ancient Greece: 'The statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are words from which belief has gone." As with the pa**age from substantial God to the Holy Spirit, the properly dialectical reanimation is to be sought in this very medium of , grey' notional determination: The understanding, through the form of abstract universality, does give [the varieties of the sensuous], so to speak, a rigidity of being . . . but, at the same time through this simplification it spirituality animates them and so sharpens them.) This 'simplification' is precisely what Lacan, referring to Freud, deployed as the reduction of a thing to Ie trait unaire we are dealing with a kind of epitomization by means of which the multitude of properties is reduced to a single dominant characteristic, so that we get 'a concrete shape in which one determination predominates, the others being present only in blurred outline': 'the content is already the actuality reduced to a possibility its immediacy overcome, the embodied shape reduced to abbreviated, simple determinations of thought'.4 The dialectical approach is usually perceived as trying to locate the phenomenon-to-be-an*lysed in the totality to which it belongs, to bring to light the wealth of its links to other things, and thus to break the spell of fetishizing abstraction: from a dialectical perspective, one should see not j ust the thing in front of oneself, but this thing as it is embedded in all the wealth of its concrete historical context. This, however, is the most dangerous trap to be avoided; for Hegel, the true problem is precisely the opposite o ne: the fact that, when we observe a thing, we see too much in it, we fall under the spell of the wealth of empirical detail which prevents us from clearly perceiving the notional determination which forms the core of the thing. The problem is thus not that of how to grasp the multiplicity of determinations, but rather of how to abstract from them, how to constrain our gaze and teach it to grasp only the notional determination. Hegel's formulation is here very precise: the reduction to the signifjring 'unary feature' contracts actuality to possibility, in the precise Platonic sense in which the notion (idea) of a thing always has a deontological dimension to it, designating what the this should become in order to beautify what it is. 'Potentiality' is thus not simply the name for the essence of a thing actualized in the multitude of empirical things (the idea of a chair as a potentiality actualized in empirical chairs). The multitude of a thing's actual properties is not simply reduced to the inner core of this thing's 'true reality'; what is more important is that the signifying reduction accentuates (profiles) the thing's inner potential When I call someone 'my teacher', I thereby outline the horizon of what I expect from him; when I refer to a thing as 'chair', I profile the way I intend to use it in future. When I observe the world around me through the lenses of a language, I perceive its actuality through the lenses of the potentialities hidden, latently present, in it. What this means is that potentiality appears 'as such', becomes actual as potentiality, only through language: it is the appellation of a thing that brings to light ('posits') its potentials. Once we grasp Arifhebung in this way, we can immediately see what is wrong with one of the main topics of the pseudo-Freudian dismissal of Hegel: the notion of Hegel's System as being the highest and most overblown expression of an oral economy. Is not the Hegelian Idea effectively a voracious devourer which 'swallows up' every object it comes )(ii PREFACE upon? No wonder Hegel saw himself as Christian: for him, the ritual eating of bread transubstantiated into Christ's flesh signals that the Christian subject can integrate and digest God himself without remainder. Is, consequently, the Hegelian conceiving/grasping not a sublimated version of digestion? Hegel writes, If the individual human being does something, achieves something, attains a goal, this fact must be grounded in the way the thing itself, in its concept, acts and behaves. If! eat an apple, I destroy its organic self-identity and a**imilate it to myself That I can do this entails that the apple in itself, already, in advance, before I take hold of it, has in its nature the determination of being subject to destruction, having in itself a h*mogeneity with my digestive organs such that I can make it h*mogeneous with myself Is what he offers not a lower version of the cognition process itself in which, as he likes to point out, we can only grasp the object if this object itself already 'wants to be with/by us'? One should push this metaphor to the end: the standard critical reading constructs the Hegelian absolute Substance-Subject as thoroughly constipated - retaining within itself the swallowed content. Or, as Adorno put it in one of his biting remarks (which, as is all too often the case with him, misses the mark), Hegel's system 'is the belly turned mind',6 pretending that it swallowed the entire indigestible Otherness . . . But what about the counter-movement: Hegelian sh**ting? Is the subject of what Hegel calls 'absolute Knowledge' not also a thoroughly emptied subject, a subject reduced to the role of pure observer (or, rather, registrar) of the self-movement of the content itself? The richest is therefore the most concrete and most subjective, and that which withdraws itself into the simplest depth is the mightiest and most all-embracing. The highest, most concentrated point is the pure personality which, solely through the absolute dialectic which is its nature, no less embraces and holds evenly within itself In this strict sense, the subject itself is the abrogated/cleansed substance, a substance reduced to the void of the empty form of self-relating negativity, emptied of all the wealth of 'personality' - in Lacanese, the move from substance to subject is the one from S to