Absolute Knowing

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (115)

1. #01

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.48

   I > 1 > Suff ering as Ideology

   Theoretical move: Ideology is defined by its promise to render loss productive (redeemable through future gain), whereas psychoanalysis — and Hegel's Phenomenology read against the grain — insists on the absolute, unproductive character of founding loss; the death drive is therefore the engine of genuine ideological critique, since it is precisely what no ideology can acknowledge.

   To reach absolute knowledge is to come to this insight. As Hegel puts it, 'The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit: to know one's limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself.'

2. #02

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.305

   I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 1. The Formation of Subjectivity

   Theoretical move: This endnote cluster advances the theoretical argument that loss is constitutive of value, subjectivity, and drive, reinterpreting Freud's death drive as the theoretical elaboration of repetition compulsion and positioning Hegel—rather than Nietzsche or Schopenhauer—as Freud's closest philosophical predecessor through the shared recognition of a structural limit (nonknowledge/unconscious desire) within the project of knowledge.

   Absolute knowledge, for Hegel, names the point at which the subject recognizes an unsurpassable limit, a point of nonknowledge, within its field of knowledge.

3. #03

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.336

   I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 8. The Politics of Fantasy

   Theoretical move: This notes section advances the argument that fantasy is theoretically inescapable—neither Western philosophy nor Marxist politics can fully overcome it—and that the properly psychoanalytic (Lacanian) attitude toward fantasy is not its elimination but its dialectical traversal, which simultaneously dispels and reconfigures it.

   his absolute knowledge is not the fi nal overcoming of fantasy but the recognition that the fantasmatic disturbance is what thought can never overcome.

4. #04

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans · p.67

   <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_52"></span>**dialectic**

   Theoretical move: Lacan appropriates the Hegelian dialectic—particularly through Kojève's reading—to frame psychoanalytic treatment as a dialectical experience, while decisively breaking with Hegel by denying any final synthesis (Absolute Knowing), replacing the telos of progress with 'the avatars of a lack' anchored in the irreducibility of the unconscious.

   For Lacan, there is no such thing as a final synthesis such as is represented by Hegel's concept of absolute knowledge; the irreducibility of the unconscious represents the impossibility of any such absolute knowledge.

5. #05

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part21.xhtml_ncx_101"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part21.xhtml_page_0119"></span>***K***

   Theoretical move: This passage makes two theoretical moves: first, it positions Kleinian psychoanalysis as a key foil for Lacan's reading of Freud, cataloguing his criticisms (fantasy in the imaginary, neglect of the symbolic, linguistic unconscious) while acknowledging partial affinities; second, it articulates Lacan's fundamental distinction between two modes of knowledge—imaginary connaissance (ego-based misrecognition) and symbolic savoir (unconscious desire, jouissance of the Other)—establishing their opposed roles in psychoanalytic treatment.

   psychoanalytic treatment does not aim at a Hegelian 'absolute knowledge', because the unconscious is irreducible; there is an inescapable division between the subject and knowledge.

6. #06

   Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.265

   **XXI**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth does not stand opposed to error but rather propagates itself through error — and that psychoanalysis is the site where this structure becomes operationally legible: in the slip, the failed act, and the dream, truth irrupts from within discourse without requiring either confrontation with the real object or Hegelian absolute knowing. Speech is thereby established as the constitutive third term of the transference, irreducible to any two-body, imaginary psychology.

   From whence the Hegelian conception of absolute knowledge. Absolute knowledge is this moment in which the totality of discourse closes in on itself in a perfect non-contradiction up to and including the fact that it posits, explains and justifies itself.

7. #07

   Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.74

   BookX Anxiety > **v** > Schema of the effaced trace

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety arises when the constitutive void that preserves desire is filled in by a false response to demand, and that the drive (distinct from instinct) is structured by the cut between barred subject and demand, with partial objects (breast, scybalum) marking the place of this void rather than stages of relational maturation.

   The word is justified by the philosophical tradition, which makes the Bewusste of consciousness coincide with absolute knowledge. This won't do for us, in so far as we know that this knowledge and consciousness don't coincide.

8. #08

   Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.196

   **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that woman's relation to jouissance is structurally superior to man's because her bond with desire is looser — she is not knotted to the phallic negative (-φ) in the same essential way — and uses mythological (Tiresias), philosophical (Sartre/Hegel), and topological (the pot/void) resources to articulate how the real is not lack but fullness, while the hole/void that structures desire is specifically man's burden.

   the prophet of absolute knowledge teaches this man that he makes his hole in the real, which in Hegel is called negativity

9. #09

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.247

   OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Subject Supposed to Know is the constitutive condition of transference, and that Freud occupies a uniquely legitimate—and unrepeatable—position as the one analyst who genuinely held the knowledge he was supposed to know, making his function the permanent horizon against which every analytic position is measured.

   no psychoanalyst can claim to represent, in however slight a way, a corpus of absolute knowledge.

10. #10

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.236

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that aphanisis is the structural condition of every subject — there is no subject without the subject's fading — and uses this to distance his own dialectic from Hegel's: where Hegel promises mediation and successive syntheses toward Absolute Knowing, Lacan's vel of alienation institutes a permanent division that forecloses any such closure, tracing this inaugural moment to Descartes rather than Hegel.

    the effective experience that has been established in the perspective of an absolute knowledge never leads us to anything that may, in any way, illustrate the Hegeian vision of successive syntheses

11. #11

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.236

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that aphanisis is the necessary condition of subjectivity itself—there is no subject without its fading in the Other—and uses this to distinguish his dialectic from Hegel's: the subject emerges at the level of meaning only through its aphanisis in the locus of the unconscious, with no Hegelian mediation or synthetic progression.

    the effective experience that has been established in the perspective of an absolute knowledge never leads us to anything that may, in any way, illustrate the Hegeian vision of successive syntheses

12. #12

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.247

    OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is constitutively tied to the position of the Subject Supposed to Know, and uses Freud's unique historical status as the one analyst who *actually* knew (rather than merely being supposed to know) to clarify both the function of that position and the institutional drama it generates within analytic communities.

    no psychoanalyst can claim to represent, in however slight a way, a corpus of absolute knowledge

13. #13

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.233

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analysable symptom is constitutively structured as a reference to Knowledge—always indicating that something is known (or unknown) somewhere—and uses this to distinguish neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, while simultaneously positioning the psychoanalyst as the Subject Supposed to Know who enters the signifying operation rather than standing outside it as a classifier; this framework is then set against Hegel's Absolute Knowing and modern epistemology to articulate that knowledge is itself a signifying articulation contingent on its moment of constitution.

    All the same, there are many among you here who know where Hegel proposes the completion of history in this incredibly derisory myth of absolute knowledge.

14. #14

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.241

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's position as "subject supposed to know" is structurally paradoxical—Freudian discovery itself forecloses the possibility of a complete knowledge-subject—and grounds the subject's existence not in a harmonious closure of signifiers but precisely in the *lack* of a signifier, which is further illustrated by contrasting the God-like Newtonian subject of absolute knowledge (who "is nothing" because he lacks nothing) with the subject that only emerges where knowledge is incomplete.

    a too perfect subject like the subject of knowledge, which is the first true model of this absolute knowledge which haunted Hegel

15. #15

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.57

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan justifies his topological models (Klein bottle, Möbius strip, cross-cap, torus) as the necessary formal apparatus for grasping the subject as a surface, aligning this with Hegel's Phenomenology and its loop of Absolute Knowing, and connecting both to the analytic concept of the Subject Supposed to Know as the structural foundation of transference.

    nowhere better than in this text is there demonstrated the character of loop that the notion of absolute knowledge constitutes

16. #16

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.57

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan justifies his use of topological models (Klein bottle, Möbius strip, torus, cross-cap) as theoretically necessary — not merely illustrative — by arguing that the subject must be conceived as a surface, and that this topological thinking finds its philosophical parallel in Hegel's Phenomenology, whose loop of absolute knowledge illuminates the analytic concept of the subject supposed to know and transference.

    nowhere better than in this text is there demonstrated the character of loop that the notion of absolute knowledge constitutes, permitting, by pushing with the little finger, by pushing by one notch the sense of this 'subject supposed to know'

17. #17

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.240

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Subject Supposed to Know functions as a structural necessity for analytic engagement, yet the very foundations of psychoanalysis—grounded in the lack of a signifier—preclude any closed, totalizing knowledge; the subject is constituted not as the support of a harmonious signifying system but precisely through the gap where a signifier is missing, and this is illustrated through the contrast between Newtonian "absolute knowledge" (where the subject vanishes into God) and the Freudian discovery that grounds subjectivity in lack.

    a too perfect subject like the subject of knowledge, which is the first true model of this absolute knowledge which haunted Hegel

18. #18

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.234

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symptom is constitutively structured around a reference to knowledge — not merely as a sign of some organic state but as a signifier that indicates "somewhere it is known" — and uses this to differentiate psychosis, neurosis, and perversion by their distinct relations to knowledge/non-knowledge, while positioning the psychoanalyst as "subject supposed to know" who enters the signifying operation rather than merely classifying from outside.

    All the same, there are many among you here who know where Hegel proposes the completion of history in this incredibly derisory myth of absolute knowledge.

19. #19

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.240

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 22: Wednesday June 7 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots from a critique of structuralism's elision of the subject to a positive claim that the subject's fundamental relation to the body is mediated by objet petit a as the sub-product of the "difficulty of the sexual act," and that the classical alienation-formula ("I am not thinking / I am not") maps onto a "for the Other" structure that regrounds the subject's constitution in that very difficulty.

    a little residue remained, from the beneficial dialectic to which there was offered in advance total order, absolute knowledge, and which is called the Dasein

20. #20

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.227

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan re-grounds the locus of the Other in the body (as the site where the signifier is originally inscribed), then pivots to argue that jouissance—distinguished from pleasure as its beyond—cannot be derived from Hegelian self-consciousness or dialectics but must be theorised through the structural impossibility of the sexual act, with the signifier's reference found not in thought but in its real effects.

    He can allow himself to introduce into it the telos, the end, the goal, of an absolute knowledge. It is in so far as at the level of certainty, he finds himself being able to indicate that it does not contain its truth in itself.

21. #21

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.240

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 22: Wednesday June 7 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject's constitutive relation to the body is mediated by the sexual act as a fundamental "difficulty," and that objet petit a—as a subjective residue or sub-product of signifying articulation—names the partial, fallen junction between subject and body that grounds the sexual act; this reframes the alienation/vel structure by locating the "I am not thinking / I am not" alternative as the logical form through which the subject encounters the impossibility of the sexual act.

    before signalling to us, 'Bye bye, sail away now'... it told you that, all the same, a little residue remained, from the beneficial dialectic to which there was offered in advance total order, *absolute knowledge,* and which is called the *Dasein*.

22. #22

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.227

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 21: Wednesday 31 May 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan repositions jouissance as the central concept linking the failure of the sexual act to subjective constitution, arguing that the signifier's introduction into the real—not thought—gives jouissance its radical analytical value; this requires both a departure from the Hegelian dialectic (where jouissance belongs to the master) and an opening toward the irreducible non-relation at the heart of sexuality.

    He can allow himself to introduce into it the telos, the end, the goal, of an absolute knowledge. It is in so far as at the level of certainty, he finds himself being able to indicate that it does not contain its truth in itself.

23. #23

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.77

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is structurally grounded in the analyst's prior traversal of analysis, whereby the analyst's *désêtre*—his shedding of the Subject Supposed to Know—positions him as pure support for the objet petit a, and that this logic illuminates the status of every act, distinguishing the Freudian dialectic of enjoyment from both Cartesian and Hegelian suspensions of knowledge.

    this subject is designed to give us, at the end of the adventure, absolute knowledge… what kind of subject can depend upon it, for even a single instant

24. #24

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.139

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is uniquely defined by the irreducibility of the language-effect as its object and by the constitutive division of the subject that no knowledge can exhaust — thereby distinguishing it from psychotherapy and from Hegelian absolute knowing — and grounds this in the structural difference between hysteria and obsession as two modes of the subject's relation to the repressed signifier.

    That the en-soi is of its nature destined to be reduced to a pour-soi. That a pour-soi would envelop at the end of an absolute knowledge everything involved in the en-soi.

25. #25

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.77

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act constitutes a structural "tipping over" of the completed analysis: the analysand who has realized himself in castration rotates into the position of the analyst, who must embody the désêtre of the Subject Supposed to Know and offer himself as the little o-object — thus the logic of alienation that initiates analysis is preserved and repeated at a new level, renewing the question of the status of every act.

    this subject is designed to give us, at the end of the adventure, absolute knowledge... this knowledge of DEATH, namely, another extreme, radical form of putting in suspense as the very foundation of this subject of knowledge

26. #26

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.139

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is defined not by a criterion external to it but by the psychoanalyst as instrument, and that the psychoanalytic act brings the subject to an awareness of its constitutive, irreducible division as a language-effect — a division that definitively refutes the Hegelian project of exhaustive self-knowledge (gnothi seauton / pour-soi) and is exemplified in the contrasting logical structures of hysteria and obsession.

    That the en-soi is of its nature destined to be reduced to a pour-soi. That a pour-soi would envelop at the end of an absolute knowledge everything involved in the en-soi.

27. #27

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.266

    Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969 > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 23 April 1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan stages a confrontation between Hegel's Selbstbewusstsein and the Freudian unconscious to argue that thinking is constitutively a censorship of an originary "I do not know," and that desire (to know) is born from this nodal failure of knowledge — a topology illustrated via the Klein bottle and Möbius strip, and clinically anchored in free association and the objet petit a.

    The time of History is necessary so that at the end, I think at the right place, at the place where I will have become Knowledge. But, at that stage, there is absolutely no longer any need for thinking.

28. #28

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.64

    **Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the truth "speaks I" (rather than being spoken by a subject), and formalises this through the ordered pair of signifiers to show that the subject is constituted as infinite repetition within—and thus excluded from—absolute knowledge; this logical structure grounds both the analytic rule of free association and the link between the subject supposed to know, transference, and objet petit a.

    big O, if we define it as possibly including itself, namely, having become absolute knowledge, has this singular consequence that what represents the subject is only inscribed there... in the form of an infinite repetition

29. #29

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.378

    Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structures of hysteria and obsessional neurosis by mapping each onto a foundational "model" (woman/master) and showing how each neurotic subject installs a Subject Supposed to Know in place of that model's constitutive ignorance, while grounding the whole analysis in the set-theoretic logic of the Other and the o-object.

    we can see there progressing then in a dialectic what is stated about the relationships of the master and the slave. And where? At the level of the slave himself towards an absolute knowledge.

30. #30

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.135

    **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > Seminar **9:** Wednesday **29** January **1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Fibonacci series and the golden ratio (φ/o) to demonstrate that the subject's division is irremediable: the relation between the subject of enjoyment and the subject constituted by the unary trait (1) can never collapse into self-identity (Hegelian Selbstbewusstsein), because the o (objet petit a as surplus-jouissance) is always already an effect of the inaugural mark and persists as an irreducible remainder across infinite repetition.

    What tends to give this image as representing an ideal that one day could be closed by an absolute knowledge?

31. #31

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.47

    *[A porter appears]*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Discourse of the Hysteric underlies both philosophical discourse (Hegel as "the most sublime of hysterics") and analytic experience, and that the structure of psychoanalytic interpretation operates through a logic of the "half-said" — figured as either a riddle (stating without statement) or a quotation (statement invoking authorial authority) — with the analyst functioning as Objet petit a and cause of desire rather than Subject Supposed to Know.

    if ever this historical advance... culminated in absolute knowledge, it would only be to mark the cancellation, the failure, the vanishing at the end of what alone motivates the function of knowledge - its dialectic with enjoyment

32. #32

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.98

    *[A porter appears]*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Discourse of the Master structurally generates surplus-jouissance as the extracted 'tithe' from the slave's knowledge, and that Marx's critique of surplus value is the memorial of this prior extraction of enjoyment — a process whose secret lies in knowledge itself, not in labour, thereby subverting Hegel's claim that labour culminates in Absolute Knowledge.

    we can, from the start, confidently put in doubt the claim that at the horizon, work generates an Absolute Knowledge, or even any knowledge.

33. #33

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.258

    **ANALYTICON** > Seminar 14: Wednesday 10 June 1970

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic as a foil to show that the Master Signifier is constitutively tied to the impossibility of mastery, and that the Real—defined as the impossible—cannot be reached through truth alone; this structural impossibility is what the discourse of the master conceals and what analytic discourse uniquely allows us to articulate.

    the slave arrives, at the end of history, at this term which is called Absolute Knowledge. Nothing is said about what happens then

34. #34

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.18

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BOOK XVII** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 26 November 1969**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that philosophy's historical function is the betrayal and expropriation of the slave's knowledge (*episteme*) in order to transmute it into the Master's knowledge, and that it is only by breaking from this wrongly-acquired knowledge — through Descartes's extraction of the subject — that modern science is born; moreover, the desire to know is radically distinct from knowledge itself, and it is the hysteric's discourse, not the Master's will, that actually leads to knowledge.

    At the other end we have Hegel's discourse, with its outrageous 'absolute knowledge', as it is called. What can this absolute knowledge possibly mean, if we begin with the definition that I allowed myself to recall as being the originating one for our way of proceeding concerning knowledge?

35. #35

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.82

    VI > M. H YPPOLI TE: A lot is.

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's discovery of the death drive marks the decisive rupture with humanism and ego-psychology: where Hegel's phenomenology ends in an "elaborated mastery" grounded in reciprocal alienation, Freud escapes anthropology altogether by establishing that "man isn't entirely in man" — the death instinct is not an abdication of reason but a concept that surpasses the reality principle.

    The end of history, that's absolute knowledge. You can't get out of that - if consciousness is knowledge, written as such in Hegel.

36. #36

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.116

    **IX**

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the unconscious as the site where being, by speaking, enjoys and wants to know nothing about it — thereby challenging Aristotelian/traditional science's equation of thought with its object — and uses this to position analytic discourse against both behaviorism and Christianity, while aligning his own practice with the 'baroque' as the aesthetic/ethical mode that sides with the sleeve rather than the winning hand of classical thought.

    Kojève... recognized in it nothing less than absolute knowledge such as it is promised to us by Hegel.

37. #37

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.224

    J.Lacan-... of this? > **Seminar 11 : Wednesday 8 May 1973**

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines the unconscious against the Aristotelian premise that "being thinks," positing instead that being-in-speaking *enjoys* and wants to know nothing about it — thereby making jouissance, not knowledge-drive, the motor of the unconscious — and then traces how this claim restructures the relation between truth, science, Christianity, and the barred subject.

    recognising in it nothing less than absolute knowledge as it is promised to us by Hegel.

38. #38

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.85

    So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 15 February 1977**

    Theoretical move: Lacan re-reads "The Purloined Letter" through the figure of Bozef (introduced by Alain Didier Weill) as an incarnation of Absolute Knowledge — knowledge that is in the Real but does not speak — to argue that the Borromean topology of RSI, the structure of the Passe, and the objectification of the unconscious all hinge on the same redoubling of knowledge ("I know that he knows that I know that he knows"), while distinguishing the silent, real truth from the lying Symbolic and the false-but-consistent Imaginary (consciousness).

    Bozef is, I would say, the incarnation of Absolute Knowledge, and what Alain Didier Weill extrapolates... shows the journeying of a truth which in fact is nowhere made obvious.

39. #39

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.66

    So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**

    Theoretical move: Through a game-theoretic allegory (Bozef/king chess positions), the passage argues that the subject's total dispossession before an omniscient Other (Absolute Knowing at R3) forces the emergence of the repressed signifier S2 into the Real—constituting aphanisis/fading—and that the only exit from this petrified position is a single word ("it is you," S(Ø)) which, rather than merely keeping one's word, *sustains* speech as an act anchored in the subject's desire, making the pass (passe) the topological test of whether enunciation corresponds to enunciating.

    at B3, because of what one could call 'the absolute knowledge of the Other', Bozef, the position of the cogito of Bozef will be completely dispossessed of his thought.

40. #40

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.267

    THE DESIRE TRAP

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hamlet is not merely another version of the father-hero myth but a uniquely articulated dramatic structure that maps the very framework of desire—showing how, under specific conditions, desire must be sought at mortal cost—and that the ghost's command pivots not on vengeance against Claudius but on the mother's desire, which is the essential, immediate object of the conflict.

    Jones can blithely wax ironic on this score, for he convincingly shows that the unconscious mainspring has nothing to do with motives of a lofty or highly abstract kind, related to morality, the State, or Absolute Knowledge

41. #41

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.519

    33 1. The way the wager was structured

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Kojève's reading of Hegel's Absolute Knowing—and Queneau's novelistic satirization of it—as a foil to articulate Lacan's fundamental theoretical commitment to the divided subject: wisdom's 'perfect satisfaction' and absence of division is precisely what Lacanian theory refuses, and Hamlet (bustling, uncertain, linguistic) is posed against the Kojevian Sage as the proper figure of the subject.

    the final stage of the trajectory proposed in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) [...] According to Lacan, Queneau's novel derides men who have attained absolute knowledge.

42. #42

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.10

    *Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the entire philosophical tradition stemming from Descartes's cogito rests on a single structural prejudice — the Subject Supposed to Know — and that psychoanalysis radically subverts this prejudice by demonstrating that the Other (as locus, not subject) is merely the depository of the supposition of knowledge, which returns to the subject as the unconscious.

    This absolute knowledge itself - as we will see in the light of this question - takes on a singularly refutable value... the Other knows even less about it than he, for the good reason precisely that it is not a subject.

43. #43

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.17

    *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961*

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Cartesian cogito as producing not a stable subject but a vanishing subject ("I think and I am not"), whose constitutive vacillation demands a structural guarantor—the Master Signifier as unique, absolutely depersonalised trait (einziger Zug)—which grounds the signifying chain and points toward the Subject Supposed to Know.

    if we find ourselves more easily than others put on our guard against this mirage of absolute knowing, one which can already be sufficiently refuted by translating it into the satiated repose of a sort of colossal seventh day

44. #44

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.13

    *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961*

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that analytic identification is fundamentally signifier-identification (as opposed to imaginary identification), and grounds this in a critique of the Saussurean signifier, information theory, and the Subject Supposed to Know—arguing that the Cartesian cogito reaches an impasse precisely because the subject of enunciation cannot be grounded in any absolute knowledge.

    we have no right to pose it as possible for the subject in some sort of absolute knowledge or other

45. #45

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION VII. Critical Solution of the Cosmological Problem.

    Theoretical move: Kant resolves the cosmological antinomy by exposing the transcendental illusion that treats phenomena as things-in-themselves; once this assumption is dropped, the opposed propositions (finite/infinite world) constitute a merely dialectical—not analytical—opposition, both of which can be false, thereby furnishing an indirect proof of transcendental idealism.

    the complete series of conditions, and with them the unconditioned, is at the same time given in the very fact of the conditioned

46. #46

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > To Philosophical . . .

    Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Hegel's philosophy radicalizes finitude to the point of its own dissolution, thereby grounding a genuinely 'absolute fatalism' that is more subtractive than any prior philosophical rationalism—one that reveals nothing to reveal, and identifies freedom not with capacity but with the vanishing of all grounds, including finitude itself.

    If this were in fact Hegel's ultimate point, we could understand this very structure as the meaning of 'absolute knowing.'

47. #47

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.108

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > From the Worst Philosopher . . .

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the standard catalogue of criticisms against Hegel (too idealist, too materialist, too rationalist, too eschatological, etc.) should be reread not as disqualifications but as symptoms of a productive "too muchness" that grounds a rigorous link between freedom and fatalism — specifically, that genuine Hegelian freedom requires assuming the worst, making Hegel an absolute fatalist rather than a failed idealist.

    totality, teleology, necessity, closure, completion, system, absolute idea, absolute knowing, and, last but not least, the end

48. #48

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.129

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > <span id="unp-ruda-0016.xhtml_p127" class="page"></span>Absolute Knowing, Absolute Fatalism

    Theoretical move: Absolute knowing is recast as "absolute fatalism" and "absolute comedy": it is the impossible-yet-necessary self-assumption of what makes knowledge impossible, a sacrificial move in which reason surrenders itself to its own constitutive limit, thereby distinguishing truth from knowledge and collapsing the distinction between knowing and unknowing.

    absolute knowing is a knowledge that knows what is constitutive of any knowledge: it is based on something that it cannot integrate into itself.

49. #49

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.133

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > First as Fatalism of Substance, Then as Fatalism of the Subject

    Theoretical move: Hegel's "absolute fatalism" is not resignation but the paradoxical precondition of genuine freedom and subjectivity: only by assuming that everything is always already lost—the apocalypse has already happened—can the subject emerge through the act of *Entlassen* (release), making fatalism and subjectivity structurally identical rather than opposed.

    The only way to prepare for becoming a subject (and this is what is at stake with absolute knowing) is to assume that God agrees with me, although he also admits that he does not exist

50. #50

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.120

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > Providence . . .

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's concept of providence, when pushed to its logical extreme through the structure of absolute necessity and self-recoil, dialectically inverts: the absolutely necessary consequence of the deadlock between God and his plan is that the only divine plan is that there is no divine plan—thereby transforming blind fatalism into the very precondition of freedom and contingency.

    For philosophy it is necessary to know what is absolutely necessary, that is, to know providence. Hegel already contended in his Science of Logic that the task of this science is to expose 'God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind.'

51. #51

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > In the End God Had to Admit

    Theoretical move: Ruda's reading of Hegel argues that the 'cunning of reason' and divine providence undergo an absolute recoil: knowing God's plan means knowing there is no plan, and this self-negating knowledge — the coincidence of mediation and immediacy — forces God himself to admit he does not exist, making absolute fatalism the very precondition of a philosophy of freedom located 'where there is even less than nothing.'

    The structure of this knowledge is what Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit grasps under the name of absolute knowing.

52. #52

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.112

    Hegel and Absolute Fatalism > To the Philosophy of the Worst . . .

    Theoretical move: Ruda reads Hegel's philosophy as constitutively a "philosophy of the worst" — a philosophy of the end that can only begin when dissolution is already underway and irrecoverable, such that spirit's history is structurally a history of worsening rather than progress, and philosophy's reconciliation is reconciliation *with* destruction, not *of* it.

    philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late . . . only when actuality has completed its process of formation and attained its finished state.

53. #53

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > The Lacanian Return to Freud

    Theoretical move: Boothby positions Lacan's "return to Freud" as a theoretically ambitious refounding of psychoanalysis through three cardinal registers (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real), a radical critique of Ego Psychology's adaptation model, and an insistence that the signifier—not the ego—determines the subject, with the Other as the ultimate horizon of desire.

    the undertaking of the psychoanalyst acts in our time as a mediator between the man of care and the subject of absolute knowledge.

54. #54

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.49

    Barbers and Philosophers > **Wagging Tongues** > **Windbags, Windsucks, and Hegelian Gert Westphalers**

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel's "absolute method" as a form of sophistic windbagging: rather than delivering on its promised philosophical rigour, the method distracts through erudite historical spectacle, and its transmission via "Hegelian Gert Westphalers" perpetuates deception across generations, turning philosophy into idle talk (*Snakketøi*).

    the result of 6,000 years of world history… the absolute method and Hegel… Nowadays the absolute method is at home not only in logic but also in the historical sciences.

55. #55

    The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.27

    part i

    Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Hegel's account of comedy in the Phenomenology—specifically the "noumenological" movement whereby Absolute Spirit must come to know itself—to argue that what Hegel and Lacan share is a structural insight: genuine transformation requires not only a change in the subject's consciousness but a shift in the external Symbolic/Other in which the subject's unconscious is materialized, and this "short circuit" between the lack in the subject and the lack in the Other is the properly comic (and analytic) dimension of experience.

    the 'Absolute Knowledge' that follows the chapter on religion and concludes the Phenomenology is nothing but a paradoxical coincidence of the knowledge of the patient with the knowledge of the chicken.

56. #56

    The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.50

    part i

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comedy enacts the speculative Hegelian passage from abstract to concrete universality: not by representing the universal through the individual, but by forcing the universal to relate to itself, thereby generating the subject as the gap within substance—a movement she aligns with Lacanian representation and illustrates through Lubitsch and Chaplin.

    not to mention the ultimate comedy (and this is not meant ironically!) bearing the title 'Absolute Knowledge.'

57. #57

    The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.32

    part i

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy achieves a qualitative shift beyond tragedy by dissolving the gap of representation: where tragedy holds essence (the universal) apart from the actual self via the mask, comedy collapses that distance so that the individual self itself becomes the negative power through which universal powers vanish—making the comic character not the physical remainder of symbolic representation, but essence itself in its physical actuality.

    the framework of self-representation of Absolute Spirit

58. #58

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.100

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **Capitalist Nature/Anabasis**

    Theoretical move: By reading Hegel's mechanism/chemism dialectic through Marx's critique of political economy, the passage argues that capitalism naturalizes itself by rendering subjective ends as either externally mechanical or internally chemical necessities, producing a "realm of shadows" in which no genuine subject or world exists — and that the only path out is a materialist appropriation of Hegel's Logic of shadows leading back through abstraction to a Real that is immanent to the shadows themselves.

    to understand what it means to be free – as free as God was before the creation – is to understand what it means to pass through the laborious steps of the shadows (that is, concepts).

59. #59

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.122

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **Hegel and Capitalism**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel, contra the standard Marxist-Althusserian critique of idealist abstraction, operates as a contemplative materialist whose "method of inquiry" reconstructs reality in thought rather than deriving it from pure concept—and that his system contains immanent antagonisms (civil society, rabble, property) that exceed what he consciously theorized, making him a resource for a communist theory of labor, freedom, and institutions.

    This plague can be traced back to Kojève, whose reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and especially the absolute knowledge, left its traces in all of postwar French philosophy.

60. #60

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.56

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism](#contents.xhtml_ahd3)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Adorno's "negative dialectics" misreads Hegel's reconciliation as false positivity, when Hegelian reconciliation is always already reconciliation *with* antagonisms; the two exits from Adorno's deadlock—Habermas's communicative a priori and the Lacanian path—are contrasted, with Žižek defending a third, properly Hegelian reading in which the subject's lack is grounded in the incompleteness of the objective order itself, thereby opening radical action through the "redoubling of the lack."

    A return to Hegel, but to a Hegel read in a different way, not in the sense of the total subjective mediation of objectivity in the style of young Lukács.

61. #61

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.9

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-2453"></span>Unorientable Space of <span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-498"></span><span id="introduction_the_unorientable_space_of_dialectical_mater.xhtml_IDX-1339"></span>Dialectical Materialism

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a programmatic argument that dialectical materialism must be reconceived as a formal materialism of unorientable surfaces—without substantial matter or teleological development—and that sexuality (understood as radical negativity following Lacan) is the privileged site where the parallax gap between ontology and the transcendental is redoubled and thus our sole contact with the Absolute, with topology (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle) providing the structural vocabulary for this redoubling.

    sexuality as our privileged contact with the Absolute … the circle of reflexivity is brought to the Absolute

62. #62

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.287

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-780"></span>of <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1619"></span><span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1834"></span>Quantum <span id="corollary_3_the_retarded_god_of_quantum_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1168"></span>Ontology > [The Implications of Quantum Gravity](#contents.xhtml_ahd19)

    Theoretical move: Žižek uses quantum physics (wave-function collapse, decoherence, virtual particles) to argue that ignorance is not merely epistemic but has a positive ontological status inscribed in reality itself, which in turn redefines the big Other/God as necessarily non-omniscient and "retarded" (always registering too late), and connects this to a Hegelian dialectic in which the indivisible One of a thing is identical with a void of Nothing at its core.

    This paradox of a constrained god, a god whose knowledge is limited, brings us back to the Hegelian Absolute Knowing.

63. #63

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.373

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [The All-Too-Close In-Itself](#contents.xhtml_ahd25)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian subject's fear of the In-itself as external/transcendent must be displaced by the Hegelian move of internalizing that exteriority: Absolute Knowing is not omniscience but the transposition of the obstacle to knowing into the heart of the subject itself, and this shift is isomorphic with the move from the masculine (exception-based) to the feminine (non-all) position in Lacan's formulas of sexuation, where the In-itself is legible only as the cut or stain inscribed within phenomenal reality rather than beyond it.

    Absolute knowing is the articulation of this immanent exteriority of thinking in its starkest form... not 'knowing everything (there is to know)' but the transposition of the external obstacle to the subject's knowing into the very heart of the subject itself.

64. #64

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.84

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel > [From *Intellectus Ectypus* to *Intellectus Archetypus*](#contents.xhtml_ahd6)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's speculative identity of thinking and being is not a pre-reflexive intuitive unity but a unity mediated by gap — the Absolute itself must be understood as internally split, with "thinking" being the activation of the hole within Being rather than the transcendence of it.

    what 'falls asunder' in Kant's thought is the Absolute in its transcendent immobility and the movement of subjective mediation which cannot attain the Absolute

65. #65

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > Notes

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/endnotes section for the chapter "The Three Unorientables," providing bibliographic references and brief theoretical asides; the substantive theoretical moves are minimal, though note 15 articulates a dialectical reversal (form/content relation) and note 38 alludes to the Klein bottle's topological obscenity.

    Quoted from Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (manuscript, to appear by MIT Press).

66. #66

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.122

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Sexual Parallax and Knowledge](#contents.xhtml_ahd8)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the shift from Kant to Hegel is not a return to pre-critical ontology but a move that inscribes epistemological antinomies into the Real itself, making "subjective distortion" the very mode of contact with the Absolute—and that sexuality, as the impossible-real Absolute, is accessible only through the detours and gaps of the symbolic order, with Lacan's formulas of sexuation homologous to Kant's antinomies of pure reason.

    Our contact with the Absolute is the very subjective 'distortion,' so the move beyond Kant does not involve any kind of 'objective' dialectics but the inclusion of subjective 'distortions' into 'objective' processes—this redoubling of 'distortion' is what defines the Absolute.

67. #67

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology

    Theoretical move: The passage introduces the concept of the "parallax gap" as ontologically real—not merely epistemological—by illustrating through Prus's story how two incommensurable dimensions (realist and transcendental) coexist without synthesis, and then uses the couple's silent mutual deception as a figure for Hegelian Absolute Knowing.

    This silent knowledge could be considered a figure of what Hegel called Absolute Knowing, his version of our contact with the Absolute.

68. #68

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.71

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel > [Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ahd5)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Hegel's decisive move is not to bridge but to dissolve the Kantian gap by transposing it *into* Being itself—"subject" names the crack in Being—and correspondingly, that Reason is not an addition to Understanding but Understanding minus its constitutive illusion that its analytic power is merely external to reality.

    Hegel does not answer him by claiming that he can overcome the Kantian gap and thereby gain access to Absolute Knowledge in the style of a pre-critical metaphysics.

69. #69

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.65

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Intellectual Intuition and *Intellectus Archetypus*: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel

    Theoretical move: The passage maps German Idealism's tension between two poles of subjectivity—immediate intellectual intuition versus reflexive mediation—and argues that Hegel resolves this tension by asserting reflexivity itself as absolute power, in contrast to Kant's rejection of intellectual intuition for finite subjects.

    to Hegel, who overcomes this tension by way of asserting reflexivity itself as the absolute power

70. #70

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.176

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Days of the Living Dead](#contents.xhtml_ahd11)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that cyberspace does not dissolve the Symbolic Order but intensifies it, and that the Oedipal structure, castration, and the death drive form a parallax unity rather than a sequence—jouissance is what makes a human animal "properly mortal," while a "downward negation of negation" characterizes modernity as the failure even to fail.

    Hegel is not simply the thinker of closure, of the closed circle of the end of history in Absolute Knowing, but also the thinker of the terrible void of inertia when, after 'the system is closed,' nothing (that we can think) happens although 'the time goes on.'

71. #71

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.147

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "Absolute Knowing" names a redoubled not-knowing in which ontological incompleteness is displaced into reality itself, and that this logic—exemplified by the Lacanian "subject of the unconscious" structured as a Kierkegaardian apostle—entails rejecting the human/animal exception as the origin of sexual deadlock: the rupture of sexuality is pre-human, constitutive of nature as such, with humanity merely the site where this constitutive gap "appears as such."

    "Absolute knowing" is thus a name for redoubled not-knowing: it doesn't bring any new knowledge, it just displaces our not-knowing into the object of knowledge itself.

72. #72

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.61

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [<span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_p57" class="pagebreak" title="57"></span>The Margin of Radical Uncertainty](#contents.xhtml_ahd4)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that radical materialism requires rejecting both "objective reality" and consistent subjectivity, identifying the Real not with nature-in-itself but with the crack/gap in every ontological edifice—a deficiency shared by transcendental reason and reality itself—which Freud/Lacan name 'sexuality,' and whose trans-ontological elaboration requires a concept of 'less than nothing' formalized through the Klein bottle as the minimal definition of the Absolute.

    Such a circular turn of self-relating by means of which a movement gets caught in its own loop is the minimal formal definition of the Absolute.

73. #73

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.384

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > Notes

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for the chapter "The Persistence of Abstraction," providing scholarly citations and brief ancillary remarks (e.g., on totalitarianism vs. authoritarian antagonism); it contains no primary theoretical argumentation of its own.

    Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, The Dash: The Other Side of Absolute Knowing, Cambridge (Ma): MIT Press 2018, p. 47.

74. #74

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.18

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [<span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_p18" class="pagebreak" title="18"></span>Modalities of the Absolute](#contents.xhtml_ahd1)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Absolute Knowing is not a revelation of hidden content but a "redoubling of the gap"—the gap separating subject from the Thing is transposed into the Thing itself—and defends this move against Pippin's critique by insisting that unity (the One) is a retroactive effect of division rather than its presupposition, a structure he calls "absolute recoil," which he then differentiates from Meillassoux's speculative-materialist ontologization of contingency.

    We can now provide a more precise determination of Absolute Knowing: it stands for this redoubled ignorance, for the violent twist through which we come to realize that our ignorance is simultaneously the ignorance in the heart of the Other itself.

75. #75

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Hegel’s <span id="scholium_12_hegels_parallax.xhtml_IDX-834"></span>Parallax

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Absolute Knowing's self-purifying immanence paradoxically inverts into free association and arbitrary decision, and that the unbridgeable gap between Hegel's *Phenomenology* and *Logic* — readable as a Möbius strip or cross-cap — is the Real/impossible at its purest, while the further reversal between dialectical skepticism and stable encyclopedic knowledge constitutes the ultimate "infinite judgment" of philosophy.

    The concluding moment of Hegel's system, "Absolute Knowing," confronts us with the ultimate figure of this radical instability and tension: the immanent self-deployment of the Idea purified of any externality, relating just to itself, inverts into its apparent opposite—it leaves behind its subjective agent and turns into "a thought without a thinker."

76. #76

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: Žižek, following Malabou, argues that Hegelian sublation must culminate in a self-sublating 'speculative abrogation' — a release of the object into its own being — and that Absolute Knowledge involves a radical passivization of the subject, displacing the Kantian model of active synthesis in favour of the object's autopoietic self-deployment.

    The movement of suppression and preservation produces this transformation at a certain moment in history, the moment of Absolute Knowledge.

77. #77

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Hegelian dialectical process is itself the most radical form of a 'process without a subject' — thereby collapsing Althusser's materialist critique of Hegel, since Hegel's thesis that the Absolute is both Substance and Subject means precisely the emergence of a pure void-subject correlative to a self-deploying System requiring no external subjective agent.

    it is crucial to grasp the Absolute not only as Substance, but also as Subject

78. #78

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Hegel's notion of 'absolute freedom' as *absolvere* (releasing/letting go) resolves the dualism between Spinozist determinism and Fichtean voluntarism: the subject's supreme freedom consists not in mastery but in self-erasure, allowing the Idea to release Nature from itself — a move Žižek reads as the Hegelian version of *Gelassenheit*.

    'Absolute freedom' is here literally absolute in the etymological sense of absolvere: releasing, letting go.

79. #79

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: Žižek rereads Hegel against the standard 'postmodern' critique by proposing that Hegelian 'absolute liberation' is not the full internalization of otherness but rather a 'reconciliation' that operates through a shared division cutting across both the particular subject and the universal substantial order — a move that, far from contradicting Lacan's critique, may actually converge with it.

    the pure Idea in which the determinateness or reality of the Notion is itself raised into Notion, is an absolute liberation for which there is no longer any immediate determination that is not equally posited and itself Notion

80. #80

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the irreducible antagonism at the heart of social life (sexuality, ecology, democracy, culture) cannot be dissolved but only acknowledged, and that Hegelian dialectics—properly understood as a systematic notation of the failure of totalization rather than its achievement—provides the most consistent model for this acknowledgement; 'absolute knowledge' is reread through a Lacanian lens as acceptance that the Concept itself is 'not-all'.

    'absolute knowledge' denotes a subjective position which finally accepts 'contradiction' as an internal condition of every identity.

81. #81

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Hegelian externalization must be dissociated from alienation: the dialectical process concludes not with reappropriation of the excremented Other but with a sovereign 'letting go,' and Nature marks the non-All of the Idea's totality rather than functioning as a constitutive exception that closes the Idea's self-mediation — which also means there is no mega-Subject piloting the Hegelian System.

    a philosopher, from his standpoint of Absolute Knowledge, experiences nature not as a threatening force to be controlled and dominated, but as something to be left to follow its inherent path.

82. #82

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: Žižek reframes the Hegelian move from Substance to Subject not as constipated retention (Adorno's critique) but as excremental release: the subject is the 'barred substance'—emptied of all content through absolute negativity—which in Lacanese maps onto the split subject ($), and this logic of 'letting go' governs Hegel's philosophy of nature, theology, and art.

    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?

83. #83

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx and Freud share a fundamental homology in their interpretative procedures: both move beyond unmasking hidden content (latent dream-thought / labour-value) to analyze the secret of the *form itself* (dream-work / commodity-form), and that this formal analysis—rather than hermeneutical content-extraction—is the true theoretical contribution common to both, grounding Žižek's project of reading Hegel through Lacan for a theory of ideology.

    'absolute knowledge' itself is nothing but a name for the acknowledgement of a certain radical loss

84. #84

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    PREFACE

    Theoretical move: By reading Hegel through the Lacanian "non-All," Žižek argues that Hegelian totality is itself non-All: material reality is a sign of the Notion's imperfection, truth is self-measuring rather than correspondence-based, and Badiou's undecidable Truth-Event is structurally homologous to this immanent dialectical logic—making Hegel the philosopher of the non-All rather than of closed totality.

    one compares a statement with itself, with its own process of enunciation

85. #85

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.71

    Borna Radnik > Notes

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage provides the scholarly apparatus for an argument that dialectical materialism requires an idealist center, drawing on Hegel's absolute recoil (absoluter Gegenstoß) as a universal ontological principle in which positing and presupposing are mutually constitutive, and situating this against Meillassoux's correlationism, Badiou's democratic materialism, Fichte's subjective idealism, and Kant's transcendental limits.

    Žižek interprets Hegel's speculative understanding of absolute recoil as a universal ontological principle.

86. #86

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.73

    Borna Radnik > Notes > 32. As Hegel puts it in the *Science of Logic*:

    Theoretical move: This passage, composed almost entirely of endnotes, works through the Hegelian dialectic between the world of appearance and the supersensible world to argue that their opposition collapses into identity, and draws on Marx's critique of Hegel to argue that a genuine dialectical materialism must be a "materialism with the Idea" (Hegel's absolute Idea) rather than a materialism grounded in an alternative idealist core.

    The Logic thus exhibits the self-movement of the absolute idea only as the original word... The idea is, therefore, only in this self-determination of apprehending itself; it is in pure thought, where difference is not yet otherness, but is and remains perfectly transparent to itself.

87. #87

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.66

    Borna Radnik

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's logic of the concept is simultaneously ontologically and thought-constitutive, distinguishing his absolute idealism from Kantian transcendental idealism and Fichtean subjective idealism by showing that conceptual determination is not merely a subjective act but is immanent to reality itself, culminating in the absolute Idea as the unity of subject and substance.

    The absolute Idea is absolute (i.e., nonrelative) because it emerges as the supreme result of all conceptual determinations. There is nothing else left for the absolute Idea to think because any and all thought-determinations have come before it.

88. #88

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.217

    Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze

    Theoretical move: Against new materialist (Deleuzean) ontologies of Becoming that dissolve the subject into immanent flux and promise plenitude, the passage argues from a Lacanian-Hegelian standpoint that ontological incompleteness—the barred, split subject—is irreducible and is in fact the condition of possibility for freedom, joy, and genuine subjectivity; a close reading of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is deployed to show that Deleuze's ventriloquism of Woolf suppresses the very void of subjectivity her text stages.

    collapsing distinctions between subject and object into what Adrian Johnston calls a 'seamless, undifferentiated Absolute.'

89. #89

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.68

    Borna Radnik

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx's dialectical materialism is distinguished by its integration of Hegel's absolute Idea—understood as the unity of subject and substance, concept and reality, theory and practice—thereby overcoming both contemplative materialism (Feuerbach) and Meillassoux's speculative materialism, which generates performative contradictions by neglecting the idealist center of its own positing activity.

    The comprehension of human practice, of theory and practice, is the absolute Idea as the unity of conceptual determination and objectivity, or the unity of subject and substance, or again, the unity of thinking and being.

90. #90

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.133

    Adrian Johnston

    Theoretical move: Johnston positions his "transcendental materialism" against both external critics (OOO, especially Harman) and internal Lacanian critics (Chiesa, De Vos, Pluth), defending a dialectical-materialist Hegelianism against the charge of antirealist spirit monism, while introducing Žižek's "universalized perspectivism" as the key exhibit in that dispute.

    Harman assaults the Hegelianism common to Žižek and me as an antirealist spirit monism. Of course, this all-too-familiar caricature of Hegelian philosophy mistakes absolute for subjective idealism.

91. #91

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.77

    Todd McGowan

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Fichte's framing of idealism vs. materialism as an irresolvable, personality-driven choice is a false binary, and that Hegel's "objective idealism"—grounded in the necessity of contradiction rather than synthesis—dissolves this opposition by showing that idealism, taken to its absolute limit, becomes materialism.

    Hegel sees that the path of idealism leads us to materialism. It becomes its other through becoming absolute.

92. #92

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.115

    Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian gap between the phenomenal and noumenal is not a limitation to be overcome (as Fichte and Schelling attempt via intellectual intuition) but is itself the condition of freedom and the key to the Hegelian move: Hegel transposes this gap *into* the Absolute itself, so that Being is constitutively incomplete and "subject" names this crack in Being—a move structurally parallel to conceiving Understanding without its Beyond as Reason itself.

    Hegel does not answer him by claiming that he can overcome the Kantian gap and thereby gain access to Absolute Knowledge in the style of a pre-critical metaphysics. What he claims is that the Kantian gap already is the solution: Being itself is incomplete.

93. #93

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.61

    Borna Radnik

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that any consistent materialism must openly acknowledge its implicit idealist foundation in conceptual determination, and that Hegel's dialectical logic—specifically the "positing the presupposition" thesis and the absolute recoil—demonstrates that thought and being are inextricably unified, making the idealism/materialism opposition meaningless and grounding a dialectical materialism.

    the dialectical, infinite-activity of becoming that constitutes the absolute Idea engenders a materialism that avoids self-reflexive contradiction by virtue of its unification of the concept (subject) with objectivity (substance).

94. #94

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.117

    Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's distinction between Understanding and Reason is not a corrective supplement but a subtraction: Reason is Understanding stripped of its constitutive illusion that its own abstractive violence is merely external to reality. This reframes intellectual intuition — from Kant through Fichte and Schelling — as an illusory projection that Hegel rejects rather than fulfills.

    Spirit is, in its simple truth, consciousness, and forces its moments apart.

95. #95

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.27

    part i

    Theoretical move: Zupančič uses Hegel's treatment of comedy in the *Phenomenology* as a lens to argue that genuine subjective change requires not merely the subject's self-knowledge but a corresponding shift in the external Symbolic (the "Other"), and that this double movement—where lack in the subject must coincide with lack in the Other—is shared by both Hegel and Lacan, with transference as its analytic condition.

    the 'Absolute Knowledge' that follows the chapter on religion and concludes the Phenomenology is nothing but a paradoxical coincidence of the knowledge of the patient with the knowledge of the chicken.

96. #96

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.32

    part i

    Theoretical move: The passage traces a dialectical movement from epic to tragedy to comedy in Hegel's Phenomenology, arguing that comedy does not merely expose the failure of representation but dissolves representation altogether by making the individual self coincide with essence—the universal is no longer separated from the actual self by the mask, but appears as the physical itself.

    Is it not all too obvious that Hegel simply and skillfully uses certain forms of art to fill in the speculative framework that he develops and constructs independently of them, the framework of self-representation of Absolute Spirit?

97. #97

    The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.50

    part i

    Theoretical move: Župančič argues that the distinction between subversive and conservative comedy cannot be located in content or self-parody, but rather in the structural move comedy performs: the passage from abstract to concrete universality, in which substance becomes subject through an inner split — a move structurally homologous to Hegel's Phenomenology and illuminated by the Lacanian logic of representation.

    not to mention the ultimate comedy (and this is not meant ironically!) bearing the title 'Absolute Knowledge.'

98. #98

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.78

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Kierkegaard as a Hegelian

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Kierkegaard's apparent anti-Hegelianism conceals a disavowed proximity to Hegel: both thinkers share a commitment to reopening the past's contingency rather than closing it into necessity, and the genuine Hegelian dialectical move is not to view the present as already-accomplished finality but to restore potentiality to actuality—a gesture that aligns with Kierkegaard's ethico-existential insistence on contingent singular decision over cognitive-objective thought.

    This umbilical link between the universal System and the accidental individual obeys the very logic of what Hegel called 'infinite judgment': the paradoxical conjunction of the Universal with the 'lowest' singularity ('Spirit is a bone,' etc.).

99. #99

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.386

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > Introduction: Dialectical Materialism at the Gates

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys the parallax concept as both a structural and political category—defining revolutionary utopia as the abolition of the parallax gap, and mobilizing Hegelian dialectics (U-P-I contradiction, singularity, Absolute as Subject-Object) alongside Badiouian materialist dialectics to articulate the logic of truth, drive, and universality against liberal "democratic materialism."

    The One which differs from itself is the Absolute qua Subject; sciences endeavor to grasp it as object; politics is the Absolute 'as such,' a contingent, fragile process in which the very fate of the Absolute is at stake.

100. #100

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.10

     **Contradiction**

     Theoretical move: Contradiction is not a logical error to be resolved but the constitutive motor of Hegelian thought itself: rather than driving toward resolution, thinking moves in order to discover ever-more-resistant contradictions, and the Absolute marks the point where this preserving/heightening function of contradiction becomes undeniable.

     When thought arrives at the absolute and thereby achieves totalization, the status of contradiction undergoes a thoroughgoing transformation. At the point of the absolute, thought can no longer seek the resolution to contradiction through another dialectical movement.

101. #101

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.2

     **Absolute Knowing (Hegel)**

     Theoretical move: This passage functions as a keyword glossary, establishing the theoretical content of three interrelated Lacanian/Hegelian concepts—Absolute Knowing, Alienation, and Adaptation—by tracing how each turns on a constitutive negativity: the subject's limit is integral to its understanding, alienation is the very condition of subjectivity rather than something to be overcome, and the human disconnection from environment (jouissance/death drive) is what distinguishes us from animals.

     At the culminating stage of absolute knowing, the subject-object opposition is obliterated. It is replaced by the unity of pure thinking, which communes only with itself and at the same time expresses all that is.

102. #102

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.38

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms](#contents.xhtml_ch1)

     Theoretical move: The passage critiques Žižek's rapprochement between Hegel and Schelling by arguing that Hegel's opening of the Science of Logic is actually a covert refutation of Schelling's pure indeterminacy, and that Hegel's emergentist 'layer-cake' ontology is genuinely different from and superior to Schelling's pseudo-emergentist 'layer-doughnut' model, with Lacan's 'rabbit in the hat' critique being recruited to illuminate Schelling's circular presupposition of spirit within nature.

     on one occasion, Lacan depicts the 'absolute knowing' (das absolute Wissen) of the concluding chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as itself a rabbit Hegel sneaks into his hat earlier in the Phenomenology

103. #103

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.8

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > A Threefold Cord: Lacan, Hegel, Marx

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's thought pivots on a triangulation of Lacan, Hegel, and Marx, with the Real and the Death Drive as central categories: the Real (as internal distortion of the Symbolic) and the Death Drive (as self-negating negativity equated with Hegelian dialectics) together ground Žižek's psychoanalytic politics and his defence of subjectivity against poststructuralist dissolution.

     Hegel's notion of absolute knowing is not a complete solution to contradiction but a recognition that we will never overcome contradiction.

104. #104

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.90

     Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel](#contents.xhtml_ch4)^{<a href="#4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_en4-1" id="4_slavoj_ieks_hegel.xhtml_nr4-1">1</a>} > I

     Theoretical move: The passage introduces Žižek's *Less than Nothing* as a serious attempt to "reanimate or reactualize" Hegel through Lacanian metapsychology in a materialist form, arguing that standard objections to Hegel (hyper-rationalist holism, reconciliation philosophy, triumphalism) attack a straw man, and that a properly understood Hegel reveals significant overlap with his ostensible critics (Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Freudians), making available a non-triumphalist historical diagnosis.

     He is taken to be a hyper-rationalist holist whose central claim is that the Absolute (something like what Kant called the unconditioned) is the Idea, and that everything there is can be understood as the actualization, in nature and across historical time, of the Idea.

105. #105

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > Universally Antagonistic

     Theoretical move: Žižek's political project is grounded in a reconceptualization of universality as constitutive antagonism rather than totalizing wholeness: particulars, identities, and social structures emerge from and are sustained by a universal antagonism that can never be resolved, making emancipation consist not in overcoming antagonism but in insisting on it—a position figured topologically through the Möbius strip and the objet a as the excremental singular point that embodies the universal.

     It functions as a topographical model not just for Lacan's conception of the real but also for Hegel's absolute. Taking a position up absolutely puts one into the opposite position

106. #106

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms](#contents.xhtml_ch1)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's quantum-ontological updating of Schelling commits him to a "layer-doughnut" model in which human subjectivity is the return of a repressed ontological ground-zero, and that this preference for Schelling over Hegel creates an unresolved epistemological gap where quantum physics cannot substitute for the transcendental-logical function that Hegel's Logic performs within his encyclopedic system.

     Schelling directly equates the dynamic productivity of speculative physics (i.e., Natur as per Naturphilosophie) with the subjectivity of philosophy (as transcendental idealism).

107. #107

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Retroactivity of the Real](#contents.xhtml_ch3) > Žižek’s Retroactive Ontology

     Theoretical move: Žižek's Hegelian retroactivism grounds a political ethics of committed action over detached critique by showing that failure is constitutive of the dialectic itself, that truth exceeds the Symbolic Order / Big Other of Absolute Knowing, and that the Hegelian Whole is always already split by its own symptoms and unintended consequences.

     The point is not so much the fabled Hegelian Absolute Knowing, which is governed by the symbolic order (Lacan's Big Other).

108. #108

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.159

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Neroni](#contents.xhtml_ch6a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses self-critique to advance three corrective moves on his standard positions: (1) the disintegration of the big Other is a real social danger, not merely a theoretical non-existence; (2) jouissance is the irreducible motor of ideology that neither class-interest analysis nor discourse-hegemony models can capture; (3) the state must be theorized not only as an instrument of class oppression but as the material embodiment of a 'real illusion' of common protection, as revealed by the pandemic.

     The lesson of Hegel's absolute knowing is exactly the opposite: it is a knowing which includes its own incompleteness. Knowledge is non-all in the Lacanian sense

109. #109

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Retroactivity of the Real](#contents.xhtml_ch3) > Žižek’s Retroactive Ontology

     Theoretical move: Žižek's key philosophical contribution is the concept of retroactivity—the ontological claim that necessity is retroactively produced by contingent acts rather than pre-given—which challenges both essentialist ideology critique and standard readings of Hegel as a thinker of absolute reconciliation, while coupling Hegel's dialectic with a suspension of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

     these celebrated figures, each in his own way, indulge in a 'ridiculous caricature of Hegel the 'absolute idealist' who 'possessed Absolute Knowledge''

110. #110

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.211

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Zalloua](#contents.xhtml_ch8a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "dislocation" — the radical re-contextualization of an element into a new symbolic space that confers an entirely new meaning — is the key dialectical concept that corrects misreadings of Hegelian Sublation: in genuine dialectical passage, Universality itself is dislocated and a predicate becomes a new Subject, so that no single overarching Substance persists through history.

     what Hegel calls 'Absolute' is the very process in which radical reversals happen and a predicate turns into a new Subject.

111. #111

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms](#contents.xhtml_ch1)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's "layer-cake" emergentism, which insists on genuine non-identity between substance and subject (via "sondern ebensosehr"), is philosophically superior to Schelling's "layer-doughnut" panpsychism, which covertly presupposes subjectivity within nature; and further that Hegel's privileging of contingent actuality over possibility as the foundational modal category provides a more defensible metaphysics than Schelling's potentiality-first ontology—a distinction that also bears on how Žižek should interpret quantum collapse.

     Absolute Spirit as a God-like mega-Mind teleologically orchestrates from above and in advance the fateful trajectory of all reality and history.

112. #112

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > Žižek’s Intervention

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of ideology is constitutively different from Marx's and Althusser's because it grounds the social order in the Real (unconscious, split subject, antagonism) rather than material-economic conditions, and achieves this by fusing Lacan's non-existent Big Other with Hegel's foundationless dialectics — locating ideology as a cover for external social antagonism rather than as the effect of an economic base.

     there is no foundational starting point on the path to absolute knowing. In many ways, this is his primary intervention into German idealism—the refusal of any foundation for thought.

113. #113

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.217

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: Bou Ali reconstructs Žižek's theory of the subject as a non-ontological point of negativity that is extimate to symbolic structure, correlative to the objet a as object-cause of desire, and grounded in the retroactive (Nachträglichkeit) constitution of the Real as cause—arguing further that this account of subjectivity is inseparable from Lacanian sexuation, read against both Hegelian dialectics and Kantian antinomies.

     There is no room here to engage at length with the complexity of Hegel's account of absolute knowledge and the problematics that are associated with it, not to mention Žižek's own singular reading of Hegel's corpus.

114. #114

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [<span class="grey">INDEX</span>](#contents.xhtml_end1)

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section from the edited volume "Žižek Responds!" listing proper names and concepts (H–K) with hyperlinked page references; it performs no theoretical argument.

     absolute knowing [here], [here], [here], [here], [here], [here], [here], [here], [here], [here], [here], [here]

115. #115

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan

     [THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ABSENT](#contents.xhtml_toc1_2) > **WHAT IS NOT KNOWN**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that universality is grounded not in shared positive traits but in a shared constitutive lack—the unknown blank spot within every subject—and that this internal absence is both the basis of love and the source of genuine emancipatory connection, which is more terrifying than particularist identity because it demands avowing self-alienation.

     Hegel defines 'knowing in its universality' as 'pure self-knowing in absolute otherness.'