Infinite Judgment

Infinite Judgment (unendliches Urteil) is a logical form distinguished by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason from both affirmative and negative judgment. Where a negative judgment simply denies a predicate of a subject ("the soul is not mortal"), an infinite judgment affirms a non-predicate of a subject ("the soul is non-mortal") — a formally affirmative proposition whose predicate is a negated term. The grammatical positivity of the copula conceals an infinite, limitless exclusion: by saying the subject "is non-X," one assigns it to the entire indefinite remainder of the universe of discourse outside X, without specifying what it positively is. This is not mere logical negation; it is negation that has been folded back into an affirmative form, thereby pointing toward an indeterminate excess or surplus that escapes both poles of a classical binary.

Žižek deploys this structure in two theoretical registers. First, in reading Fichte, infinite judgment names the ontological status of the Nicht-Ich (non-Self): the obstacle/Anstoss encountered by the self-positing I is not simply the negation of the I but an entity of a peculiar non-kind — "nothing counted as something" — whose surplus over representational content must be located within the subject rather than in a putative external reality. Second, in the context of Lacan's formulas of sexuation, infinite judgment captures what Žižek calls true materialism: not the negative claim "material reality is not all" (which still operates within a logic of exception) but the infinite claim "material reality is non-all" — an assertion that removes any constitutive exception while refusing to close the totality, pointing instead to the non-All as a structural incompleteness immanent to reality itself.

The concept appears twice, both times in Žižek's own texts (slugs: slavoj-zizek-less-than-nothing-hegel-and-the-shadow-of-dialectical-materialism-v and slavoj-zizek-sex-and-the-failed-absolute-bloomsbury-academic-2019), making it a distinctly Žižekian theoretical tool rather than a Lacanian term proper. In Less Than Nothing it functions as a specification of Negation: where ordinary negation defines by exclusion, infinite judgment names the peculiar affirmative remainder that negation leaves behind — the "nothing counted as something" that is the Fichtean Anstoss. This directly links infinite judgment to Extimacy (the ex-timate foreign body that is neither simply inside nor outside the subject) and to the Fichtean Anstoss (the irreducible obstacle that is posited by the I yet is not reducible to the I's own activity). Žižek's move is to argue that the Anstoss has the logical form of an infinite judgment: it is not the negation of the Self but the Self's constitutive non-Self, an indeterminate surplus that forces self-reflection.

In Sex and the Failed Absolute, infinite judgment is mapped onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation, and thus connects with the corpus's treatment of the Subject, the Real, and Objet petit a. The "non-All" of feminine sexuation is not a negative judgment (denying universality) but an infinite one (affirming non-totality without positing an exception), structurally parallel to the way objet petit a is not the negation of the symbolic order but its non-symbolizable remainder. The concept thus serves as a logical hinge between the Hegelian–Kantian inheritance and the Lacanian apparatus: infinite judgment is the formal operator by which both the subject's constitutive gap and the incompleteness of reality can be stated without reintroducing a transcendent exception or a Thing-in-itself — aligning with what the corpus elsewhere calls the Real as irreducible remainder, and with Form's Hegelian lesson that the gap between form and content is itself productive rather than merely privative.

Sex and the Failed AbsoluteSlavoj Žižek · 2019 (p.291)

one should apply yet again the Kantian distinction between negative and infinite judgment

The phrase "yet again" signals that this distinction is not a one-off application but a recurrent logical instrument in Žižek's arsenal; and the specific opposition between "negative" and "infinite" judgment is theoretically loaded because it marks the difference between a logic of exception (classical negation, which always implies a positive residue outside the negation) and a logic of the non-All (infinite judgment, which opens an indeterminate remainder immanent to the field itself) — the very distinction that separates Lacan's masculine from feminine formulas of sexuation.