Retroactive Positing of Presuppositions

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (45)

1. #01

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part17.xhtml_ncx_77"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part17.xhtml_page_0096"></span>***G***

   Theoretical move: This passage from Evans's dictionary traces the theoretical development of several key Lacanian concepts—gap, gaze, genital stage, gestalt, and graph of desire—showing how Lacan progressively distinguishes his positions from Freudian ego-psychology, Sartrean phenomenology, and object-relations theory through a consistent emphasis on constitutive division, the non-relation, and the structured duplicity of desire.

   The double intersection of these two lines illustrates the nature of retroaction: the message…is the POINT DE CAPITON determined retroactively by the particular punctuation given to it by the Other, A.

2. #02

   Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

   <span id="Chapter1.htm_page14"></span>‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’

   Theoretical move: Fisher argues that the "slow cancellation of the future" is not an absence of change but a collapse of cultural temporality, wherein Jameson's "nostalgia mode" — a formal attachment to past aesthetic formulas rather than psychological yearning — has been naturalised under neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism, producing a permanent anachronism that disguises the disappearance of the future as its opposite.

   cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity

3. #03

   Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

   <span id="Chapter22.htm_page211"></span>Grey Area: Chris Petit’s *Content*

   Theoretical move: Fisher uses Chris Petit's essay film *Content* as a lens to diagnose the foreclosure of a popular modernist future by Thatcherism, arguing that British culture's retreat from European modernism represents not merely an aesthetic failure but a politically enforced suppression of possible futures — a hauntological condition in which the present reverses into a fabricated past.

   'reversing into a tomorrow based on a non-existent past', as the popular modernism Radio On was part of found itself eclipsed

4. #04

   Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

   <span id="Chapter21.htm_page205"></span>Nomadalgia: The Junior Boys’ *So This is Goodbye*

   Theoretical move: Fisher coins "nomadalgia" (sickness *of* travel, as complement to nostalgia) as a critical concept to theorise the affective condition of permanent displacement in global-digital modernity, reading the Junior Boys' album as its objective correlative and linking this to hauntology and Žižek's figure of the windowless digital monad.

   Space is integral, not only to their sound, but to their songs. Space is a compositional component, a presupposition of the songs, not something retrospectively inserted at a producer's whim.

5. #05

   A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.44

   chapter 2

   Theoretical move: The structural reduction of the voice by phonology does not eliminate the voice but produces it as a remainder — the Lacanian object petit a — thereby reversing the phonological assumption that voice is raw material prior to structure and instead positioning it as the outcome of the signifying operation.

   the retroactive production of meaning, the 'quilting point,' the nature of the subject involved in it

6. #06

   A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.41

   A Voice and Nothing More > The linguistics of the non-voice

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the non-linguistic voice (laughter, singing) is neither simply outside linguistic structure nor fully captured by it, and that the singing voice's apparent surplus-meaning is a structural fantasy/illusion that functions as a fetish disavowing castration—the very condition that gives the voice its fascination. The object voice (objet petit a) is precisely what aesthetic or religious idealization of the voice conceals.

   this promise of a state of some primordial fusion to which the voice should bear witness is always a retroactive construction

7. #07

   Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.153

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that human sexuality is not a "civilized" displacement of natural animal sexuality but rather the point where the dislocation/impossibility immanent in all sexed reproduction becomes registered as such—via the Unconscious and surplus-jouissance—so that culture retroactively denaturalizes nature itself, while the transition from animal to human mirrors the Hegelian move from In-itself to For-itself applied to not-knowing.

   civilization/Culture retroactively posits/transforms its own natural presupposition: culture retroactively 'denaturalizes' nature itself, this is what Freud called the Id, libido.

8. #08

   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.

   This choice cannot be undone, we cannot go back and do it again, because the very ability to choose already presupposes the choice (the choice to choose).

9. #09

   The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

   INTRODUCTION

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the passage from positing to external to determinate reflection in Hegel requires not merely that the subject recognizes itself in the alienated Other, but that the essence must presuppose itself in the form of its own otherness—a self-fissure that constitutes subjectivity as distinct from substance, and which the Feuerbachian model of overcoming alienation fails to grasp because it omits the necessity of redoubled reflection (the incarnation motif).

   the whole dialectic of positing and presupposing still falls within the category of 'positing reflection'... the decisive feature of external reflection is that the essence presupposes itself as its own other

10. #10

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Hegel's three-stage logic of reflection (positing, external, determinate) as a model for textual hermeneutics and subject-formation, arguing that the 'beautiful soul' figure exposes the Hegelian lesson that the real act is always formal and prior—the subject must retroactively posit its own presuppositions—which distinguishes Hegel's idealist dialectics from Marx's materialist one.

    the subject of course presupposes the 'world', the objectivity on which he performs his activity… only if he retroactively posits the very presuppositions of his activity, of his 'positing'

11. #11

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.59

    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 'positing the presupposition' thesis in Hegel's Doctrine of the Concept confirms that conceptualization is always already present in the activity of thinking.

12. #12

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.62

    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.

    Conceptual determination is retroactively engendered as the logically necessary presupposition that is immanent to both thought and being.

13. #13

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.164

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Pick Up Your Cave!

    Theoretical move: By reading Plato's cave allegory through Hegel, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and cognitive neuroscience, Žižek argues that the 'true Real' is not substantial reality behind appearances but rather the irreducible gap between modes of appearance itself—a parallax gap that culminates in the absolute split between the lived experience of selfhood and the 'nothing' of the open skull.

    the true substance, the presupposition, of our world is in this sense always-already posited, it is the result of a long process of distilling, extracting, the core of reality from the flurry of deceiving shadows.

14. #14

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.159

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Burned by the Sun

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Hölderlin's "eccentric path" and the Thermidorian problem to argue that the gap between utopian aspiration and sober actuality cannot be resolved by narrative mediation alone; the true Hegelian move—reading this gap as Concrete Universality itself—requires displacing the bipolar structure (narrative vs. dissolution) with a triple structure, reread via the drive, and ultimately locating the parallax tension between poetico-mystical and political relating to the Thing as the irreducible truth of emancipatory politics.

    what he does not do is conclude that this very presupposed Ground is already retroactively posited and, as such, already (a name for) pure difference.

15. #15

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.4

    Contents

    Theoretical move: This is a table of contents for Žižek's *The Parallax View*, organizing the book's theoretical architecture around three "parallax" registers (stellar, solar, lunar) that traverse ontology, subjectivity, and politics. It is non-substantive filler content.

    "Positing the Presuppositions"

16. #16

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.274

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Ontic Errance, Ontological Truth

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's philosophy of finitude constitutes an "ontology of provisory existence" that structurally mirrors Cartesian provisional morality, but that Heidegger's great political temptation—and error—was to collapse the irreducible parallax gap between ontological truth and ontic order, leading to an illegitimate displacement from individual being-toward-death to communal sacrificial fate.

    infinity can emerge only within the horizon of finitude; it is a category of finitude

17. #17

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.111

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Comedy of Incarnation

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the standard critique of fetishism (which reduces the fetish to a contingent object filling an empty structural place) misses the "Hegelian performative" dimension whereby the big Other's empty place is constitutively correlated with an excessive partial object — castration names not merely the gap between element and empty place, but the very emergence of that place through a cut; this logic extends to a critique of the philosophy of finitude (including a Lacanian variant), which is countered by the obscene immortality of objet petit a / death drive as the true materialist infinite.

    individuals think they treat a person as a king because he is a king in himself, while in fact he is a king only because they treat him as one.

18. #18

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.246

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Unconscious Act of Freedom

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that (self-)consciousness is not the spontaneous emergent pattern of parallel cognitive agents but rather the experience of a gap or malfunction in that pattern, and that genuine transcendental freedom consists not in an empirically locatable founding act but in the retroactive positing of a primordial, unconscious decision—the subject being nothing but the void opened by the failure of reflection and self-identification, constituted only through the self-referential act of signification.

    what we should add to Dennett is 'only' (and the entire weight of the Hegelian 'positing of presuppositions' resides in this 'only') that this 'retroactivity' makes the presupposition of a 'Primary Mammal' necessary

19. #19

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.80

    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.

    what at first looks like a mere possibility, an accidental occurrence which also may not have happened, is retroactively transformed into something that was predestined to happen from all eternity.... (This position, of course, is based on a retroactive illusion, on misrecognizing its own performative dimension)

20. #20

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.410

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James > 4The Loop of Freedom

    Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus performs multiple theoretical moves simultaneously: it glosses the Lacanian big Other's radical ambiguity (symbolic substance vs. pure appearance), identifies the Master-Signifier as the answer to infinite regress in argumentation, reads anxiety (and, contra Lacan, Badiouian enthusiasm) as the affect that grants access to the Real, and deploys the Hegelian 'positing of presuppositions' to illuminate the mutual entanglement of sexual and socio-symbolic failure in marriage.

    we can also say that sexual inadequacy is a result and symptom of sociosymbolic tensions between the partners, that these tensions 'posit their presupposition' (the failed sexual life which they express)

21. #21

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.101

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a Greimasian structural analysis of the analyst's position relative to Christ, Teacher, and Scientist, arguing that both Christ and the analyst *are* rather than merely *perform* their function — one through ontological being, the other through transference. This is extended into a broader Schellingian/Hegelian thesis that Evil is the actualization of a Ground that should remain potential, illustrated through the *Star Wars* saga's failure to dramatize how excessive attachment to Good generates Evil.

    Christ himself is thus the 'diabolic' founding gesture of the Holy Spirit as the properly 'symbolic' community, the gathering of the believers.

22. #22

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.249

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Language of Seduction, the Seduction of Language

    Theoretical move: Drawing on Geoffrey Miller's evolutionary account of fitness indicators and Steven Pinker's "short circuit" of pleasure, Žižek argues that the human animal's symbolic explosion does not merely sexualize non-sexual activities but sexualizes sexuality itself—sexual activity becomes genuinely sexual only when it is caught in the self-referential circuit of drive, the repetitive failure to reach the impossible Thing; the utility-function of any human capacity is always secondary to its "wasteful" display function.

    How, then, did this retroactive loop of freedom materialize? Was it a purely contingent drift... or can we risk a more precise evolutionary account of its prehistory?

23. #23

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.207

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > "Positing the Presuppositions"

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine freedom is not the absence of causal determination but the retroactive capacity to choose which causes determine us — a "positing of presuppositions" structure that links Bergsonian retroactive possibility, Kantian self-determination, Hegelian Setzung der Voraussetzungen, and Varela's autopoiesis into a single temporal-ontological loop.

    His central notion, that of a loop or bootstrap, is reminiscent of the Hegelian Setzung der Voraussetzungen (positing the presuppositions)

24. #24

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.62

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy > ". . . ce seul objet dont le Néant s'honore"

    Theoretical move: By reading Marx's account of capital's self-movement through Hegel's substance-to-subject passage and Lacan's desire/drive distinction, Žižek argues that capitalism operates at three levels—subjective experience, objective exploitation, and an "objective deception" (the unconscious fantasy of self-generating capital)—and that the shift from desire to drive requires distinguishing objet petit a as lost object (desire) from objet petit a as loss itself (drive), while redefining the death drive as an excess of life rather than a thrust toward annihilation.

    value which, through its circulation, generates more value, value which mediates-posits itself, retroactively positing its own presuppositions.

25. #25

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.215

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > A Cognitivist Hegel?

    Theoretical move: Žižek uses Malabou's Hegelian reading of brain science to argue that neural plasticity, far from being mere adaptability, contains a genuine Hegelian negativity; and that consciousness itself—as a relational, self-referential short circuit between present input and past memory—enacts the logic of retroactive positing of presuppositions and sublation, such that the "immediacy" of qualia is the result of complex mediation collapsed into apparent simplicity.

    when the magic leap into the 'autonomy' of the neural self-relating occurs, that is, when the neural activity starts to 'glide around as if out of the control of solid earth'—in Hegelese, as if it were to posit retroactively its own presuppositions

26. #26

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.27

    The Kantian Parallax

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian parallax — the gap between phenomenal and noumenal — must be re-read as constitutive of reality itself rather than merely epistemological, which is the precise move Hegel makes: not overcoming the Kantian division but asserting it "as such," thereby revealing that the Real is not a substantial hard core but a purely parallactic gap between perspectives whose "substance" is the antagonism that distorts every symbolization.

    we are forced to conclude that, far from being a stable consistent position, the dimension of the Kantian 'transcendental' can sustain itself only in a fragile balance between the said and the unsaid, through producing something the full consequences of which we refuse to articulate, to 'posit as such.'

27. #27

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.216

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > A Cognitivist Hegel?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian objet petit a is formally homologous to the neural "attractor" — an insubstantial quasi-object generated by the very process that reacts to it — and that the subject/object distinction is purely topological (two sides of a Möbius strip), not ontological, thereby grounding a cognitivist-Hegelian account of self-consciousness as self-relating.

    it is created-posited, generated, by the very process which reacts to it and deals with it

28. #28

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.391

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 1The Subject, This "Inwardly Circumcised Jew"

    Theoretical move: This notes section deploys several theoretical pivots: the "spectral Real" is articulated in three versions linked by the subject's gaze as vanishing mediator; Kantian ethics is re-situated as the ethics inherent to both modern science and capitalist circulation-logic; and the Hegelian notion of form (das Formelle) is distinguished from its Kantian counterpart to ground the critique of political economy.

    it is the very return to the 'lost origins' which literally constitutes what was lost, and in this sense the Nation/notion—as a spiritual substance—is the 'product of itself.'

29. #29

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.352

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > The Ignorance of the Chicken

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the true stake of both psychoanalytic treatment and ideological critique is not changing the subject's conscious knowledge but transforming what the subject presupposes the big Other to know — a split that is internal to the subject itself — thereby demonstrating that fetishistic disavowal, commodity fetishism, and ideological belief all operate through displacement of belief onto an Other who is presumed not to know.

    'Kneel down and you will believe that you knelt down because you believed!' The second thing is that, in the 'normal' cynical functioning of ideology, belief is displaced onto another

30. #30

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.55

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy

    Theoretical move: Žižek, following Karatani's Kantian reading of Marx, argues that the parallax gap between production and circulation is irreducible and constitutive of Capital's movement—value is generated "in itself" in production but actualized only retroactively through circulation (futur antérieur)—and that this structural antinomy cannot be resolved by privileging either side, making Capital's self-movement a "spurious infinity" rather than Hegelian dialectical closure.

    the temporality here is that of the futur antérieur: value 'is' not immediately, it only 'will have been,' it is retroactively actualized, performatively enacted

31. #31

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.382

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby's Smile

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bartleby-gesture of pure withdrawal ("I would prefer not to") constitutes not a preparatory stage but the permanent ontological foundation of revolutionary politics—a parallax shift from the gap between two somethings to the gap between something and nothing, which simultaneously empties the superego supplement from the Law and reduces metaphysical difference to the immanent void within reality itself.

    the new postrevolutionary order does not negate its founding gesture... it merely gives body to this negativity

32. #32

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.202

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Danger? What Danger?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the emergence of genuine novelty (New Order from Chaos) requires a structural-dialectical account that cannot be reduced to adaptation logic, and that Varela's "feminine ontology" of aleatory possibility maps precisely onto the Lacanian logic of the Not-all — necessity is not-all, yet nothing escapes it.

    Although we can (retroactively) ascertain a long gestation period, one last element triggers the swift shift from Chaos to new Order

33. #33

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.208

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > "Positing the Presuppositions"

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that autopoiesis (the self-producing loop of living cells) is the biological instantiation of Hegel's "positing the presuppositions"—the retroactive self-positing of an organism's own conditions—and that this same logical structure governs the paradox of freedom/fate: a truly free act is not one that escapes necessity but one that retroactively posits it, with the "causality of appearance" (the subject as surface-effect with no substantial kernel) as the key operator.

    the One of an organism as a Whole retroactively 'posits' as its result, as that which it dominates and regulates, the set of its own causes

34. #34

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.8

    introduction

    Theoretical move: Žižek introduces the concept of the "parallax gap" as the theoretical core of dialectical materialism, arguing that the irreducible non-relation between two incommensurable perspectives (e.g., revolutionary politics and art, historical and dialectical materialism) is not an obstacle to dialectics but its very engine, and that this gap must be inscribed back into the particular itself rather than resolved by a higher synthesis.

    the shift from determinate reflection to reflective determination is crucial here—this is another case where a word or the position of words decides everything.

35. #35

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.186

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > When the God Comes Around

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the trauma of the Shoah forces theology through a dialectical succession of positions—from sovereign to finite to suffering God—and that only the theological frame can adequately register the scope of such catastrophe; this dialectic mirrors the Universal-Particular-Singular triad of Christian confessions (Orthodoxy-Catholicism-Protestantism), culminating in a Protestant God of arbitrary, Law-suspending cruelty whose dark underside is the necessary correlate of the excess of Christian love over Jewish Law.

    the postmodern solution to this is to retort that the way out of this self-incurred impasse consists in abandoning the very presupposition of the primordial One

36. #36

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.44

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "truth" of ideology lies in its universal form rather than its fantasmatic support, and that genuine subjectivity is constituted by a structural gap or noncoincidence-with-itself — a void that is not filled by particular content but is itself a stand-in for a missing particular — thereby linking the Hegelian dialectic of Subject/Substance to Lacanian aphanisis and the three-level triad of Universal-Particular-Individual.

    not only has the structural lack/void of all universality to be filled in by a particular content, its stand-in; it is this empty universality itself which is a stand-in for the radical noncoincidence of the particular to itself

37. #37

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.82

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

    Theoretical move: Žižek uses Kierkegaard's theology as the limit-point of idealism to stage a materialist inversion: whereas idealism projects closure onto a transcendent God correlative to an "open" ontology, materialism holds that the "All" is itself non-All and contingent; Kierkegaard's desubstantialized God and his structure of "infinite resignation" (Versagung) are then read as a secretly Lacanian operation in which the sacrificial loss of everything yields not a reward but the loss of the Cause-Thing itself.

    does not Hegel present his System as the 'flight of the Owl of Minerva,' which flies at dusk a retroactive recapitulation/remembering of the path of the Absolute—thus explicitly endorsing the 'point of view of finality'?

38. #38

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.239

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Hegel, Marx, Dennett

    Theoretical move: Žižek reconciles two apparently opposed Hegelian models—the priority of empty formal gesture as the first act of symbolization, and the "silent weaving of the Spirit" as the final formal reckoning with what has already happened—by arguing they operate on different registers: the former opens a symbolic space, while the latter undermines form from within, with both together constituting the dialectical transition to the New.

    the 'silent weaving of the Spirit' concerns not content, but the form itself—again, in the case of a televangelist preacher, this 'silent weaving' undermines his message at the level of its own form

39. #39

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.355

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism?

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that fundamentalism is defined by the immediate identification with fantasy (becoming the "dupe of one's fantasy") which forecloses the enigma of the Other's desire; this structural analysis is then extended to show that liberal multiculturalism's tolerant repression of passion produces the same segregationist logic it claims to oppose, leaving aggressive secularism and fundamentalist passion as mirror-image dead ends.

    the presupposed excess of/in the beloved, is reflexively posited by love itself... transcendence is the form of appearance of immanence.

40. #40

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.20

    The Tickling Object

    Theoretical move: Žižek introduces the "parallax object" as the key to understanding the subject-object relation: the objet petit a is identified as the pure parallax object and cause of the parallax gap, a minimal difference that is itself an object, irreducible to any symbolic grasp — and this structure is shown to pervade narrative form (Fitzgerald), psychoanalytic experience, and the ontology of the subject's gaze.

    is a retroactive fantasy, a kind of narrative version of what, in the history of capitalism, functions as the myth of 'primordial accumulation.'

41. #41

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.290

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward the Theory of the Stalinist Musical

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Stalinism and Nazism represent structurally distinct ideological formations: Stalinism, rooted in Enlightenment universalism, subjects subjects to a reflexive, self-monumentalizing logic (prisoners building monuments to themselves), while Nazism inscribes guilt into biological being, making annihilation the only "solution." The passage uses Nietzsche's racial-mixing formula and a beer-advertisement fantasy to show how overidentification with incompatible fantasmatic elements can traverse the fantasy that sustains ideological domination.

    the process of the creation of new Nation-States out of the disintegration of Communist 'empires' thus follows the logic of what, with regard to the rise of capitalism, Marx described as the priority of formal subsumption... a society was first formally subsumed under the Nation-State, then its ideological content was elaborated (fabricating the tradition that grounds this Nation-State).

42. #42

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.48

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian subject is not a substantial self that undergoes dispossession but IS the void that emerges through that dispossession—a retroactive, self-positing structure—and uses this to mediate between Kantian autonomy and Hegelian ethical substance via the Lacanian logic of the Not-all, showing that irreducible contingency in ethics is the very condition of genuine responsibility and act.

    presupposes itself and the sublating of this presupposition is essence itself; conversely, this sublating of its presupposition is the presupposition itself... What it thus found only comes to be through being left behind.

43. #43

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.235

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Hegel, Marx, Dennett

    Theoretical move: Against both phenomenology and cognitivism, Žižek argues—via Hegel, Dennett, and Marx—that alienation is primordial and formal: form (empty signifier, capitalist subsumption, ideological cliché) precedes and retroactively constitutes content, so that the "immediacy" of experience, meaning, or authentic social life is always already a retroactive construction.

    It seems that we immediately experience qualia, while, in effect, this immediacy is retroactively constructed.

44. #44

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.322

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

    Theoretical move: Žižek critically examines Hallward/Badiou's "politics of prescription" — the axiomatic, direct-universalist logic of emancipatory politics — exposing an internal deadlock: the concept of "forcing" (forçage) structurally requires an "Unnameable" remainder that cannot be fully actualized, which pushes Badiou's framework back toward a Kantian regulative ideal and, paradoxically, toward the liberal "to-come" logic that prescription was meant to overcome.

    Sartre explained this perfectly well: first you decide, then you justify the decision by providing it with defensible motives or reasons... The progressive-regressive method: first you act and then, in the new light of this action, you reconstruct the circumstances that led you to act.

45. #45

    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.

    In a bad version of Hegel's positing a presupposition, a version akin to Lacan's rabbit and hat, Schelling pretends to posit the subjective as emerging out of the natural.