Reflexive Determination

Reflexive determination names the Hegelian-dialectical operation by which a part of a totality retroactively constitutes — rather than merely reflects — the totality itself. In the passage at hand (p.250 of slavoj-zizek-sex-and-the-failed-absolute-bloomsbury-academic-2019), Žižek deploys the concept to account for the paradoxical status of the rabble / proletariat: this figure is not simply one element among others within a social whole but is, rather, the element whose very exclusion — its position as "part of no-part," as surplus or destructive excess — forces us to re-read what the totality is. The totality does not pre-exist and then generate its excess; on the contrary, the excess is the site at which the totality "bends back" on itself and gives itself its own final determination. Reflexive determination thus belongs to the logic of the determining reflection in Hegel's Science of Logic: a determination is "reflexive" when it is not imposed on the whole from outside but is produced from within, through the very act by which an element marks itself as the whole's outside.

This formulation is extended in Žižek's argument by the "redoubled" logic of suture: the quilting point (point de capiton) that normally stitches the social field together splits under the pressure of antagonism, generating both an excess at the top (the Master, the exception that grounds the rule) and an excess at the bottom (the rabble, the part that has no proper place). The rabble's reflexive determination of the totality means that antagonism — the failure of the social to constitute itself as a self-identical whole — is not an accident or an empirical disturbance but is written into the very concept of the whole. This is simultaneously a claim about class struggle, about the logic of the symptom (normality as symptomal compromise-formation), and about the dialectical structure of universality: the universal only attains its content through a singular element that cannot be subsumed under it.

This concept appears once, in slavoj-zizek-sex-and-the-failed-absolute-bloomsbury-academic-2019 (p.250), and is best understood as a specification and intensification of several canonical concepts working in concert. With respect to Dialectics, reflexive determination names the precise moment in Hegelian dialectics where the movement of negation does not issue in sublation but in a "remainder" that re-determines the whole; it is, as the corpus's account of dialectics puts it, closer to the "implacable" or irresolvable antagonism than to Hegelian synthesis. With respect to the Point de capiton, the concept extends Lacan's quilting logic by describing what happens when suture fails — the quilting point itself redoubles, and its underside (the part-of-no-part) becomes the hidden anchor that determines the field it was supposed to simply bind. With respect to Particularism and Singularity, reflexive determination marks the moment at which a particular element ceases to be merely particular and attains a singular universality: the rabble is not one group among others but the singular point through which the universal (social totality) is negatively defined. With respect to Ideology, the move is continuous with Žižek's broader argument that the social Real is sustained by a constitutive antagonism that ideology must suppress; reflexive determination names the structural mechanism by which that suppression simultaneously reveals what it hides. The concept also resonates with Mediation: rather than a positive third term connecting elements, reflexive determination functions as a negative mediator — the element that mediates the whole to itself precisely by being excluded from it. Finally, the extension into Hysteria and Repression is legible in Žižek's inversion of symptom-theory: normality is a symptomal compromise covering antagonism, just as the hysterical symptom reflexively determines the "normal" order it apparently disrupts.

Sex and the Failed AbsoluteSlavoj Žižek · 2019 (p.250)

the rabble, in its very status of the destructive excess of social totality, its 'part of no-part,' is the 'reflexive determination' of the totality as such

The quote is theoretically loaded because it fuses three distinct conceptual registers in a single clause: "destructive excess" signals the Hegelian determinate negation that cannot be sublated; "part of no-part" is Rancière's term for political subjectivity without a proper place, here re-inscribed within Žižek's Lacanian-Hegelian frame; and "reflexive determination of the totality as such" names the precise dialectical move whereby this excluded excess is not external to the whole but is the operation through which the whole gives itself its own final, self-grounding definition.