Zizek googles himself too much, Or: Fess up, who linked Zizek to a post of mine from five years ago?

An edit on a post of Adam Kotsko's has alerted me to the fact that I'm in the index to "Less Than Nothing", Zizek's latest big book. He block-quotes a post of mine from back when I was still in law school, durdling around with a blog to avoid doing my reading for "Contracts". I haven't read one of the pages that's presumably in reply to me because I can't see it via "Search Inside", but I replied to what I could see about myself in the comments on Kotsko's post.

It is at least a little embarrassing to see my old prose in print. But hey, I can go to Barnes & Noble and see my name now!

The elipses in the block-quote of my post in the book omits the fact that I originally had a picture of an anime character (Caster from "Fate/Stay Night") as my "Read More!" link. That used to seem like a reasonable thing to do with my blog. Oh internet, you so crazy.

edit: From page 289: "for me, replying to this critique is almost embarrassing": you and me both, buddy! So why did you feel the need to do it? From what I recall of watching my old blog-traffic, that post was never linked to anywhere online and I only had ~30 regular readers (based on pageviews). Why is it committed to the page, now?

This is what I want from a book review

Today Note Dame Philosophical Reviews reviewed Ido Geiger's "The Founding Act of Modern Ethical Life: Hegel's Critique of Kant's Moral and Political Philosophy." I quite enjoyed reading the review, and it left me with not the slightest desire to purchase the book reviewed.

The review briefly notes that Lacan comes up in the book; I suspect Zizek is lurking behind this, too, but the book is unsearchable on Amazon. Sentences like "The founding act is a new speech, which presents itself as old, the invisible deed which establishes the visible "truth" which comes after" make me want to pick For They Know Not What They Do back up, just to poke at it some more. I put it down after Zizek managed to manhandle both Russell's paradox and "The fear of God" within the same subheading. He also tries to expound on Hegel's understanding of the relationship between the Universal and the Particular without mentioning Hegel's distinction between "abstract" and "concrete universals". That is, he tries to expound on Hegel without Hegel. (To no surprise, where there should be a discussion of concrete universals there instead appears Lacan -- in particular the "not-all [pas-tout]". I have noticed a pattern -- Zizek will say he is discussing Hegel, then discuss Lacan, and then use the fact that he called Lacan "Hegel" to support Lacan. I suppose this is its own sort of "founding violence".)

Unlike Zizek, the NDPR review says many things about Hegel which are not wrong. It is a good review.

Christianity and the Terror, or: More Zizek-Bashing

Slowly moving through the preface to For they know not what they do. Continuing to be disappointed with how badly Zizek mishandles Hegel. From page xliv:

Hegel has nothing to do with such a pseudo-Hegelian vision (espoused by some conservative Hegelians like Bradley and McTaggart) of society as an organic harmonious Whole, within which each member asserts his or her "equality" with others through performing his or her particular duty, occupying his or her particular place, and thus contributing to the harmony of the Whole. For Hegel, on the contrary, the "transcendent world of formlessness" (in short: the Absolute) is at war with itself; this means that (self-)destructive formlessness (absolute, self-negating negativity) must appear as such in the realm of finite reality. The point of Hegel's notion of the revolutionary Terror [in the Phenomenology] is precisely that it is a necessary moment in the deployment of freedom.

We correct: Bradley (and the British Idealists generally) were not bad readers of Hegel when it came to political philosophy. (Robert Stern's paper on the British Idealists and the "concrete universal" is excellent, here.)

Ramblings hidden behind Caster, since they were getting a bit long.


Hegel was very much concerned, from his student days up through his mature System, with the possibility of life in a society as a harmonious existence, of being reconciled to the world and to one's life in it. Early-on, this takes the form of a Romantic idolization of Greek life as a sort of naturliche Harmonie; by the point of his Jena writings, Hegel had already become critical of this tendency in the thought of his contemporaries. (Holderlin, who had been Schelling & Hegel's roommate at the seminary in Tubingen, is a fine example of this tendency; the Greece of Holderlin's Griechenland is a heap of Romantic claptrap.) Hegel came to the conclusion that the sort of thoughtlessly harmonious existence the Greek citizen was held to have had with his city was impossible after the inward turn of Christianity, the rise of civil society, the dawn of the Enlightenment, republican ideas in politics, etc. -- natural harmony was incompatible with the idea that "man is and ought to be free".

If a modern man was to be reconciled to his world, then it could only be through a moralische Harmonie, a harmony which was not merely given but which was comprehended in thought; a man had to not merely be an harmonious part of his society, but had to recognize this harmony, had to comprehend his own existence (including what is most "inward" and private for him, such as his feelings & religious sentiments) as being integrated with the whole of life. The bulk of Hegel's criticisms of his contemporary society make the complaint that it does not make sufficient allowance for this reconciliation to become possible; the life of private individuals is too abstract from the affairs of the state (or the church, or various other social organizations), or else the state (or the church, or various other social organizations) does not make sufficient allowance for the free self-determination of individual actors to do as they judge best. Hegel does not think that moralische Harmonie is impossible; on the contrary, the possibility of this harmony is the highest achievement of modern civilization (and its philosophical handmaiden, Hegel's System, is directed towards helping this Harmonie come about more fully). This is the "end of History": with modernity Spirit knows its world as its own product, comprehends what is given to it as always already implicitly Spirit, as capable of being rationally comprehended, and the social world of "Objective Spirit" is a place where Spirit can feel "at home with itself in its other", where the individual peculiarities of a particular subject are recognized as determinations of the "universal" of society, and not something over and against it.

Zizek is one hundred eighty degrees wrong about Hegel's "the Absolute": it is not a nihil, a "transcendent world of formlessness", or any other ding-an-sich-like transcendence. Hegel's Absolute is not the Schellingian "night in which all cows are black"; the Absolute is the most contentful thing there is. The Absolute is a concrete universal; it has its being, its truth, only in the particular determinations ("moments") which make up Hegel's system -- those which make up the triad of Logic, Nature, and Spirit. The Absolute is not "at war with itself"; the Absolute particularizes itself in the asunderness of nature and returns to unity with itself in the reconciliation of asunderness with unity. To put it in religious terms, the Father begets the Son, and they are united in the Spirit of charity which proceeds from both; God creates a "fallen" world of disorder, enters into it in His only Son, and the world is reconciled to God through the life of the Spirit; the sinful individual, separated from God, becomes an adopted child of God in the community of the Spirit. The Absolute does not wage war in the divine comedy.

The "absolute, self-negating negativity" of the Terror is a moment of history, just as the Fall of Adam is a moment in the Christian story of salvation-history. For Hegel, the Terror is an exemplar of the "abstract universal": in "absolute freedom" one refuses to recognize any "given" content as adequate to the universal, to Reason, --thus the purely formal "Supreme Being" of the French Revolution, and its trumpeting of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" while the actual state was rank tyranny of the lowest sort. The "point" of Hegel's reference to the Terror is not "that it is a necessary moment in the deployment of freedom" (for this would apply to everything Hegel includes in his System), but that the Terror shows what happens when the drive for the Universal in human life takes a utopian form, trying to build everything up anew out of pure thought rather than recognizing and cultivating what is already rational in human life. The Terror of "absolute freedom" occurs in the Phenomenology at the close of the section on the Enlightenment, which is also the section on Pietism -- on faith and reason, so to speak. The Terror is just the flip-side of theocracy; in theocracy subjectivity has no voice because the only source of value is what is given from On High; in the Terror subjectivity has no voice because the only source of value is abstract "Reason". It was thus prescient of the French revolutionaries to build a temple to the idol of Reason, for this is what they viewed it as: a god to replace the unreasonable Christian one.

Hegel actually has a fairly straightforward explanation for why the revolution failed in France: France had never had a Reformation. Hegel has a very low view of the spiritual state of man under Roman Catholicism, but it's not so far-fetched in the case of France; the Catholic Church in France had long been a hotbed of corruption, and it took a ridiculous amount of time for even the modest reforms of the Council of Trent to be enacted -- even the continuing practice of simony was asserted as a "Gallican liberty" for some hundred years after the rest of Catholic Europe had begun to reform itself to curb such abuses.

In Protestant Christianity, for Hegel, women and men can recognize their own everyday lives as opportunities for divine service; the most mundane of occupations can be understood as a divinely-ordained Vocation. What is most holy is not some subset of human life, such as the priesthood or monastic life, but life itself lived in charity. Hegel even extends this opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism to the controversy over the Eucharist: In Catholicism Christ is united to something external to the believer, the bread and wine, and there replaces their ordinary substance -- all that remains of the bread and wine are mere accidents; the body of God is something fundamentally other to the everyday elements and to the believer. Although the believer can be joined with this Body in the act of consumption, this consumption is something extraneous: The Host would remain the body of Christ even if it were never consumed. On the Lutheran understanding of Communion, Christ's Body and Blood are united to the bread and wine without annulling the substance of the bread and wine -- the bread is bread, and also the Body of Christ. There is nothing in the everyday substance of the bread which precludes it also being joined with the indivisible Divine Substance of the Trinity, just as Christ's divinity did not detract from his humanity. Hegel also claims that in Protestant celebrations of Communion Christ is joined to the bread and wine at the act of consumption and not prior to it, so Lutherans do not have the constant fear of desecration that Catholics must live with. If one spills the wine, then one has spilled some wine; if one consumes the wine, then one is enjoying the blood of Christ which was poured out for our sins. In Catholicism, the Host is sanctified by the Spirit working through the officiating priest; in Lutheranism, the Host is sanctified by the Spirit present in the celebrating church-community. In general, for Hegel Catholicism is a realm of heteronomy, of slavishness and submission; Protestantism is a religion of freedom, of "the law which gives liberty" and of freedom from "the law which brings death". Thus in Catholic France, the populous was not equipped to govern their own state, for they did not even govern their own lives, but still remained in spiritual bondage. Thus when they gained political freedom it became "an opportunity for the flesh" -- subjective arbitrariness became the law of the land.

Hegel is not fair to Catholicism, but it does give him an easy counterpoint which he can contrast with the sort of Christianity he does want to affirm as rational, as being in harmony with freedom, indeed in being freedom, the Idea as Religion. It is this sort of Christianity which has made modern states possible, for Hegel; before people could be entrusted with the charge of a state, they had to learn to manage their own conduct. A free state demands free citizens, and only the universal religion freed men of their particular attachments to this or that contingent social arrangement; I think this is the real lesson to take away from Berkhof's "Christ and the Powers." (It is a crying shame that Hegel is not brought up more in contemporary discussions of "the principalities and powers"; Marx is frequently brought up in those conversations, and I think Hegel is flatly superior to Marx in this context. Marx is still too wed to various dualisms to be of much use. If I had continued with my theology studies, this would definitely be something I would have devoted some attention to; Berkhof needs to be freed from the shackles of Yoder's reading of him, and recognized as the Hegelian he really wants to be. This is assuming anyone actually cares about Berkhof, and doesn't just use him as a springboard to play at politics as a theologian. Which may be a problematic assumption. I really disliked Yoder's "Politics of Jesus".)

How Not To Overcome the Thing-In-Itself

Zizek, For they know not what they do, page xxix:

And is not this shift [from religion to atheism] also the shift from Kant to Hegel? From tension between phenomena and Thing to an inconsistency/gap between phenomena themselves? The standard notion of reality is that of a hard kernel which resists the conceptual grasp; what Hegel does is simply to take this notion of reality more literally: non-conceptual reality is something which emerges when notional self-development gets caught in an inconsistency, and becomes non-transparent to itself. In short, the limit is transposed from exterior to interior: there is Reality because, and in so far as, the Notion is inconsistent, does not coincide with itself....[Zizek's elipses] In short, the multiple perspectival inconsistencies between phenomena are not an effect of the impact of the transcendent Thing -- on the contrary, the Thing is nothing but the ontologization of the inconsistency between phenomena.

A thesis: Zizek is J.G. Fichte. This is easy to miss; Zizek isn't Kant, but he looks kinda like Kant, so he must (by process of elimination) be Hegel. Except he's Fichte.

Does not the striving of Fichte's Ego begin because of the non-identity between the Ego and the Non-Ego (though both are posits of the Ego)? Is the Ego's striving not endless because of the "shock" (Anstoss) which is the occasion (not the cause!) for the Ego's self-positing both of itself and of its other? Is the "shock" not denied to be an object of any sort, either phenomenal or noumenal? Is not the very act of the double-positing of Ego and Non-Ego unintelligible without the "shock"? Would the Ego not cease to posit both Ego and Non-Ego if not for the "shock", and thus itself cease to exist? Is Fichte's idealism not explicitly engineered to avoid the problem of positing a "thing in itself" as the unknowable cause of the Ego's representations? Does Fichte not fail at this, in part because of his demand for endless striving to (impossibly) reconcile the empirical and transcendental Egos? Is Fichte not the definitive philosopher of the Twosome? Is Hegel not a trenchant critic of Fichte's residual "thing-in-itself", the shock?

Initially, the principle that thinking determines itself from within was established in a merely formal way in the Kantian philosophy; Kant did not demonstrate the manner and extent of this self-determination of thinking. On the contrary, it was Fichte who recognized this defect; and when he made his demand for a deduction of the categories, he also tried at the same time to furnish an actual deduction too. Fichte's philosophy makes the Ego the starting point for the development of philosophical thinking; and the categories are supposed to result from its activity. But the Ego does not genuinely appear as free, spontaneous activity here, since it is regarded as having been aroused only by a shock from outside; the Ego is then supposed to react to this shock, and to achieve consciousness of itself through this reaction.
On this view, the nature of the shock remains something outside of cognition, and the Ego is always something conditioned which is confronted by an other. So, in this way Fichte, too, comes to a halt at Kant's conclusion that there is cognition only of the finite, and the infinite transcends thinking. What Kant calls "the thing-in-itself" is for Fichte the shock from outside, this abstraction of something other than the Ego, which has no determination other than that it is negative; it is the Non-Ego in general. So the Ego is regarded as standing in relation to the Non-Ego. It is only the Non-Ego that arouses its self-determining activity, and it does this in such a way that the Ego is only the continuous activity of self-liberation from the shock. But it never achieves actual liberation, since the cessation of the shock would mean the cessation of the Ego, whose being is simply its activity. Moreover, the content that the activity of the Ego brings forth is nothing else but the usual content of experience, with the added proviso that this content is merely appearance. (Encyclopedia Logic, §60, Addition 2.)

And now I will stop with the rhetorical questions. Back to the passage in question. Zizek thinks Hegel sees a "gap" between phenomena themselves ("between a thing and its place"), and that this is analogous to Kant's ding-an-sich (and identical to Lacan's Real --"the Real is a grimace of reality"). This is not a bad way to characterize Fichte's position -- phenomenal objects are not "really" things in themselves, nor are they "grounded" in things in themselves; they appear to be, and are, representations. And yet just because they are representations they are always already transcendentally ideal; they are the Ego's posits, and a reminder that the Ego is not as it ought to be, has not realized its identity with the Non-Ego, has not rendered all reality as its autonomous product. Fichte's position is not Hegel's; Hegel repeatedly lambastes Kant and Fichte for their notion of an "endless striving" by which moral progress might be made (and yet is never made, for there is always endless striving remaining). Hegel himself has no truck with the notion; reconciliation is, for Hegel, something which is possible here-and-now, in the experience of forgiveness by and reconciliation into one's community. Hegel does not replace one conflict with another, but replaces a conflict with an atonement.

For Hegel, "non-conceptual reality" would be a square circle. Nature itself is a moment of the self-development of the Idea, as is Spirit, as is "God as He is in Eternity". Hegel does not maintain the idea of a "reality which escapes the Concept" in a queer fashion, but jettisons it entirely, as a confusion. The Thing-in-itself which would escape our concepts "is already something subjectively thought", and therefore Kant's restriction of knowledge to "appearances" as opposed to "things in themselves" was straightforwardly wrong. It was not a deep insight, nor does not find its proper fulfillment in Hegel's system; it was an error which Kant didn't catch, and Hegel abandons it to the rubbish bin. To maintain a role for a "Thing" is to fail to advance to an Hegelian position.

"In short, the multiple perspectival inconsistencies between phenomena are not an effect of the impact of the transcendent Thing -- on the contrary, the Thing is nothing but the ontologization of the inconsistency between phenomena." On the contrary, the in-itself is nothing but the phenomena themselves as they appear; the shining-forth of Essence in Appearance is the self-development of the Concept; the object of knowledge is the object as it is in its truth. The duckrabbit isn't something between the duck and the rabbit; the duckrabbit drawing is what appears as a duck, and it is also what appears as a rabbit. That one stays stuck fast on a contradiction, on an inconsistency, shows that one has not moved on from the standpoint of the Understanding; Reason knows the conflicts of the Understanding as aufgehoben.

And now to read the next 200 pages or so of the book. Or at least finish the introduction. Really, this post was an excuse to remind people that Fichte exists. He is easy to forget about! Zizek doesn't mention him at all in For they know not what they do, if the index is to be trusted. (Kant, Schelling, and Hegel all get repeated mentions. Poor Fichte! I thought "The Vocation of Man" was a fun read, at least. And short! God bless ye, Fichte, for being one of the few German Idealists who could write worth a fig.)

An Excuse for a Joke

From page xiv of For they know not what they do:

The crucial point here is that Freud's famous ambivalence of libidinal states has nothing whatsoever to do with some biological or psychological-affective oscillation, but refers strictly to the radical gap between literal meaning and underlying intention. The minimal structure of this reflexivity is, of course, that of poetic repetition: if I say "window", it is just a simple designation; however the moment I say "window... window", a gap separates the word from itself, and it is in this gap that the poetic "depth" resonates. And the truth of the old cliche about the "poetic origins of speech" is that there is no single occurrence of a word: repetition always-already resonates in it. It is crucial to perceive the link between this self-reflexivity and failure: the reflexive turn towards self-awareness occurs when there is a "malfunction", when things no longer run smoothly.

A first reaction: Why isn't "Window" by itself already poetic? (Indeed, Zizek seems to say it is. Then what is the contrast between the "window" and the doubled "window"?)

I actually was not aware that "the poetic origins of speech" was commonly-repeated enough to count as a cliche, but I will take Zizek's word for it that it is. It occurs to me that the truth of the cliche is more likely to lie in the fact that "poetic" communication is possible without language; birds have sing-song, after all, and apes can hoot and howl in harmony. These are seen as a kind of music, and thus as at least a cousin of poetry; humans are then thought to have simply added something else to this hoot-and-howl base to get language. This strikes me as a reasonable chain of thought. Though of course it could be entirely wrong; biology is not an armchair discipline.

In a strong sense, "there is no single occurrence of a word" is clearly false. Novel vocabulary must begin somewhere, and wherever is first it will be singular (perhaps for a quite short time, but not for no time at all, at least not in all cases). In another sense it's clearly true -- a word can be repeated. A word which was only possible of being used once couldn't be used as a word at all. What this has to do with reflexivity or poetry, I haven't the foggiest. When a word is repeated, it's not talking about itself (as if it had to hunt down its previous instance and say "This is the word I am!"); it's doing what it did previously (to the extent that it does something else, it's not a repetition, but a new word -- perhaps a homonym).

Given that last bit I quoted, Zizek appears to be committed to the idea that (at least in principle) there might be language without self-consciousness (there is a "smooth" functioning of language before which there is no self-awareness). This strikes me as a very bad thing to commit oneself to.

This reminds of a joke Aleister Crowley was fond of telling: We are aware of our stomach only when it is upset and grumbling; we are aware of our lungs only when we are panting or wheezing; we are aware of our heartbeat only when it is going rapidly or running irregularly; in general, we are aware of our organs when they fail in their proper function. But we are always conscious of our own minds. What does this tell us about our mental health?

(Picking apart Crowley's joke will be left as an exercise to the reader. If you find yourself wanting to join the OTO, the you are taking the joke the way Crowley intended -- which means you are entirely in the wrong and should seek counsel immediately.)

Concerning a Surprise

The first sentence of Zizek's For they know not what they do contains a Brandom joke:

There are philosophical books, minor classics even, which are widely known and referred to, although practically no one has read them page by page (John Rawls's Theory of Justice, for example, or Robert Brandom's Making It Explicit) -- a nice example of interpassivity, where some figure of the Other is supposed to do the reading for us.

We are off to a good start, at least.

My copy of For they know not what they do arrived today. Sadly, looking at the index, Zizek doesn't appear to manhandle Davidson in the book; I know he's said some startlingly inaccurate things about the principle of charity before, and I was hoping I wouldn't have to do any real work to hunt them down. (Davidson is mentioned once in a footnote as a "recent analytic philosopher", but that's his sole appearance.) At least there are some decently-long Wittgenstein discussions in the book; one hopes to find some rough ground there.

I figure the worst case scenario is that I'll read for the jokes. Zizek's pretty good at delivering on such things.