Substance

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (80)

1. #01

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.129

   N OT G OD BU T AN OTHE R

   Theoretical move: Capitalist modernity creates the structural conditions for genuine freedom by displacing God as a substantial Other, but simultaneously forecloses that freedom by substituting the market as a new tyrannical authority; Kant's moral philosophy—grounding the law in the subject's own self-division rather than any external Other—is identified as the authentic philosophical articulation of modern freedom that capitalism cannot stomach.

   With the theoretical development of the heliocentric system, God ceases to be a substance.

2. #02

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.277

   . A G OD W E C AN BE LIEV E IN

   Theoretical move: This passage argues, through a series of endnotes, that the heliocentric/capitalist dislocation of God generates the structural conditions for neurosis, that Hegel's move of grasping substance as subject is the philosophical response to this dislocation, and that capitalism substitutes an unconscious, irrational belief in a new Other for genuine freedom—collapsing ontological freedom into empirical consumer choice.

   substance is itself subject, that substance suffers from the same self-division as the subject.

3. #03

   Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.32

   **II** > To Jakobson > **What is the signifier?**

   Theoretical move: Lacan defines the signifier as both the cause of jouissance (its material and efficient cause, enabling access to a part of the Other's body) and simultaneously what brings jouissance to a halt (its final cause), thereby grounding the signifier not in Aristotelian physics or Cartesian extended substance but in a new ontological category: 'enjoying substance' (la substance jouissante).

   We can't get rid of that renowned extended substance, the complement of that other substance, that easily either, since it is modern space… Pure space is based on the notion of the part, as long as one adds to that the following, that all of the parts are external to each other - partes extra partes.

4. #04

   Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.69

   What is the signifier? > What is a signifier?

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier cannot be collectivised through semantic or lexical predication alone, and that its proper "substance" is Jouissance — the body enjoys itself only by corporalising itself in a signifying way, making enjoyment-substance the third term beyond thinking substance and extended substance, and reframing the subject of the unconscious as the one who speaks stupidities rather than thinks.

   once we substantiate, it is in order to suppose a substance, and in our day, good God, we do not have substances by the shovel full. We have thinking substance and extended substance.

5. #05

   Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.34

   **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

   Theoretical move: Recanati uses Cantorian set-theoretic ordinals to formalise the logic of repetition: each ordinal both records and reproduces the gap (hole) it cannot close, so that the limit insists as an absolute, unreachable frontier — a structure Recanati explicitly maps onto the psychoanalytic dynamics of desire, interpretation, and the entrance into analysis.

   The hole, namely, the something that sustains itself all by itself, that has no need of something else and which is for philosophy the substance, or again the substance of substances, namely, being.

6. #06

   Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.103

   Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973**

   Theoretical move: Lacan advances the claim that analytic discourse, grounded in the letter rather than in lived experience or phenomenal appearance, compels an abandonment of the ontological "world" in favour of *par-être* (being-to-one-side), and that mathematics—specifically set theory's use of the letter—provides the orientation point for reading the effects of language precisely where the sexual relationship is absent.

   I cannot but slip back into what? Into this world, into this supposition of a substance which, all the same, is impregnated with the function of being.

7. #07

   Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.54

   **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

   Theoretical move: Lacan develops a logic of substance and predicate in which substance is structurally defined as what is lacking, so that predication is itself the covering-over of lack; this relay-structure—where each predicate provisionally takes the place of substance only to be displaced by the next—is identified as the operation of Being qua discourse, and language is consequently positioned as what represents Being for the word, leaving the gap of impossibility permanently open.

   The substance is what is added to zero to make 1. But in this One that is constituted, there are only predicates, namely, the zero that appears, because what makes One, precisely in the inscription of zero, is absent

8. #08

   Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.15

   **Seminar 1: Wednesday 21 November 1972** > What does that mean?

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic discourse resists grounding in any substance or being, and that the impossibility of predication (the absolute 'being' that cannot be completed) is revealed precisely through the fracture of sexed being as it is constituted by jouissance—thus breaking with philosophy and grounding analysis in topology rather than ontology.

   supported, se s'oupire, by never having recourse to any substance, of never referring to any being

9. #09

   Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.45

   **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the impossibility of totalisation (the set of all sets is impossible) is structurally homologous to the impossibility of fully encircling rupture, and that this logic governs both unconscious formations (dream, desire) and predication/substance — showing that what sustains a set or subject is always absent from what it designates, making interpretation the act of recovering the missing bracket/support.

   The substance is something that can be conceived as subsisting by itself and as the subject of everything that one conceives in it…it is starting from a point of detail that is rather derisory that one can conceive…that what was first mode, or predicate in discourse…it is enough for a certain shift in order for it to become in its turn substance

10. #10

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.49

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logic of Port-Royal's distinction between comprehension (collection of predicates) and extension (set of objects falling under a predicate) to argue that substance is simultaneously what constitutes a set and what is lacking to it — a move that grounds his concept of the subject as that which is lacking in the signifying set, and ties the logical structure of predication to his broader theory of the Real as what escapes discourse yet constitutes it.

    it depends on the dyadic relationship which opposes it to what predicates it... substance as supporting itself. Because this autonomy of substance, from then on, is altogether relative.

11. #11

    Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.55

    **Introduction** > **Seminar 4: Tuesday 21 January 1975**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot's topological properties to argue that the three consistencies—Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real—are irreducibly linked and that this triadic structure grounds both representation and the subject's condition, while the objet petit a (small o), as cause of desire rather than its object, marks an irrational, non-conjunctive gap between the One of the signifier and the One of meaning.

    The material of something is what, as near as may be, will give the image of substance, and which moreover is usual in the use made of it.

12. #12

    Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.38

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity > Destructive Plasticity in Neuroscience

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that conventional neuroscience, like conventional thought generally, imposes a teleological-positive framework that renders destructive brain processes secondary; by inverting this hierarchy and treating neuroapoptosis, synaptic pruning, and long-term depression as the primary formative forces, it establishes destructive plasticity as the ontological core of neuroplasticity itself—making the psyche, healing, and learning fundamentally negative and incurable processes.

    the DNA that governs the process does not contain, as it was once believed, a blueprint for the generation of the final form of the organism, an idea that implies an inert matter to which genes give form from the outside.

13. #13

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1787

    Theoretical move: Kant establishes the distinction between analytical and synthetical judgements, argues that synthetic a priori judgements are both possible and necessary as the foundation of all theoretical sciences (including mathematics), and poses the critical question of how pure reason can legitimately extend knowledge beyond experience without collapsing into groundless speculation.

    still we cannot think away those through which we cogitate it as substance, or adhering to substance, although our conception of substance is more determined than that of an object.

14. #14

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC. FIRST DIVISION. > SS 7.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the table of categories—organized into mathematical and dynamical classes of triads—is not merely a logical taxonomy but a generative system for a priori science, where each third category arises from a synthesis of the first two that requires a distinct act of understanding, not mere deduction.

    the understanding represents to itself the parts of the latter, as having—each of them—an existence (as substances), independently of the others, and yet as united in one whole.

15. #15

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF THE FACULTY OF JUDGEMENT OR, ANALYTIC OF PRINCIPLES.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that pure categories of the understanding can only be applied to phenomena through transcendental schemata—temporal determinations produced by the imagination that mediate between the heterogeneous domains of pure concepts and sensuous intuition, simultaneously realizing and restricting the categories to possible experience.

    The schema of substance is the permanence of the real in time; that is, the representation of it as a substratum of the empirical determination of time; a substratum which therefore remains, whilst all else changes.

16. #16

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > A. FIRST ANALOGY.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the permanence of substance is a transcendental condition of the possibility of experience: because time itself cannot be perceived, phenomena require a permanent substratum (substance) through which all temporal relations—succession, coexistence, duration—can be empirically determined; change is thus redefined as alteration of determinations of what permanently subsists, not as origination or extinction of substance itself.

    the permanent, in relation to which alone can all relations of time in phenomena be determined, is substance in the world of phenomena, that is, the real in phenomena, that which, as the substratum of all change, remains ever the same.

17. #17

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > B. SECOND ANALOGY. > PROOF.

    Theoretical move: Kant's Second Analogy argues that the causal principle ("everything that happens has a cause") is not derived empirically from observed regularities but is rather an a priori condition of the possibility of experience itself: only by subjecting the succession of phenomena to the law of causality can we distinguish objective temporal sequence from the merely subjective succession of apprehensions, thereby constituting phenomenal objects and empirical cognition at all.

    all phenomena in the succession of time are only changes, that is, a successive being and non-being of the determinations of substance, which is permanent

18. #18

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > B. SECOND ANALOGY. > PROOF.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the principle of causality—that every event necessarily follows from a preceding state according to a rule—is not merely a feature of subjective apprehension but is the very condition of the possibility of objective empirical experience, with the understanding's application of causal order to phenomena being what first constitutes the representation of an object in time.

    the primary subject of the causality of all arising and passing away, all origin and extinction, cannot itself (in the sphere of phenomena) arise and pass away, is a sound and safe conclusion, a conclusion which leads us to the conception of empirical necessity and permanence in existence, and consequently to the conception of a substance as phenomenon.

19. #19

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECOND CONFLICT OF TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAS.

    Theoretical move: Kant's Second Antinomy of Pure Reason stages the dialectical conflict between the thesis (composite substance reduces to simple parts) and the antithesis (no simple substance exists), demonstrating that pure reason generates irresolvable contradictions when it over-reaches empirical conditions — a structural illustration of the limits of speculative thought that Lacanian theory inherits via Hegel.

    with substances composition is merely a contingent relation, apart from which they must still exist as self-subsistent beings.

20. #20

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > APPENDIX. > REMARK ON THE AMPHIBOLY OF THE CONCEPTIONS OF REFLECTION.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that Leibniz's philosophical errors (monadology, pre-established harmony, intellectualization of space/time) all stem from a single source: the failure to perform transcendental reflection, i.e., to assign representations correctly to either sensibility or pure understanding before comparing them, resulting in the "amphiboly of the conceptions of reflection" — treating phenomena as if they were things in themselves cognized by the pure understanding alone.

    Matter is substantia phaenomenon. That in it which is internal I seek to discover in all parts of space which it occupies, and in all the functions and operations it performs, and which are indeed never anything but phenomena of the external sense.

21. #21

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > GENERAL REMARK

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the "I think" proposition, while empirical, cannot yield genuine self-knowledge as noumenon because internal intuition is sensuous and merely phenomenal; consequently, rational psychology cannot bootstrap itself into knowledge of the soul as a thing in itself, even if a priori moral consciousness reveals a spontaneity—since the predicates needed to determine existence remain tied to sensuous intuition and the categories (substance, cause) that apply only to phenomena.

    the thinking self must seek the conditions of the employment of its logical functions as categories of substance, cause, and so forth

22. #22

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > OBSERVATIONS ON THE SECOND ANTINOMY.

    Theoretical move: Kant uses the Second Antinomy (simplicity vs. infinite divisibility of composite substances) to demarcate the transcendental conditions under which claims about the simple and the composite are valid: the thesis (monadology) holds for substances grasped by pure understanding, while the antithesis (infinite divisibility) holds necessarily for phenomena in space; and the special case of the thinking Ego as 'absolute simple substance' is exposed as a dialectical illusion arising from mistaking the unity of self-consciousness for real ontological simplicity.

    the proof for the necessity of the simple, as the component part of all that is substantial and composite, may prove a failure... the term atomus would be more appropriate. And as I wish to prove the existence of simple substances, only in relation to, and as the elements of, the composite

23. #23

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > CHAPTER I. Of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.

    Theoretical move: Kant exposes rational psychology's foundational "paralogism" as a sophistic equivocation: the inference from the logical unity of self-consciousness ("I think") to the substantial, simple, and permanent soul illegitimately treats a purely logical subject as an ontologically real substance, and neither materialism nor spiritualism can determine the mode of the soul's existence from self-consciousness alone.

    the conception of the simple nature of substance, which is connected with the objective reality of this conception, is shown to be also invalid, and to be, in fact, nothing more than the logical qualitative unity of self-consciousness in thought

24. #24

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > GENERAL REMARK ON THE SYSTEM OF PRINCIPLES.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that categories of the pure understanding cannot demonstrate their own objective reality through mere concepts alone — they require intuition (specifically external intuition in space) to become cognitions; all a priori synthetic propositions are therefore principles of possible experience and have no validity beyond it.

    for the purpose of presenting to the conception of substance something permanent in intuition corresponding thereto and thus of demonstrating the objective reality of this conception, we require an intuition (of matter) in space, because space alone is permanent

25. #25

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > APPENDIX. > REMARK ON THE AMPHIBOLY OF THE CONCEPTIONS OF REFLECTION.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the "Amphiboly of Conceptions of Reflection" — the error of treating purely logical comparisons as determinations of things in themselves — exposes the nullity of Leibniz's intellectual system, and establishes that the noumenon can only be a negative/problematical concept: phenomena are the sole domain of objective cognition, because thought without sensuous intuition has no relation to any object.

    according to mere conceptions, that which is internal is the substratum of all relations or external determinations... in everything (substance) there is something which is absolutely internal

26. #26

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > CHAPTER I. Of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.

    Theoretical move: Kant demonstrates that rational psychology's four paralogisms arise because the "I think" of transcendental apperception—a mere logical form, not an object of intuition—is illegitimately converted into metaphysical determinations of a substantive, simple, identical, and embodied soul; the logical exposition of thought is thus mistaken for a metaphysical determination of the object.

    This latter statement—an ambitious one—requires to be supported by data which are not to be discovered in thought; and are perhaps (in so far as I consider the thinking self merely as such) not to be discovered in the thinking self at all.

27. #27

    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.

    'inwardizing, of that experience, has preserved it and is the inner being, and in fact the higher form of the substance.'

28. #28

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.211

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Towards Universalist Ethics*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuine universalist ethics must bypass particular identity categories by grounding itself in singularity rather than collective substance: only the singular subject who refuses identitarian particularity can participate in the universal, while fidelity to particularist "simulacra" (e.g., National Socialism) produces totalizing violence rather than liberating truth.

    It was, then, the brutal voiding (extermination) of Jews that was supposed to guarantee the 'substantiality' of German identity.

29. #29

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

    **Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason**

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Butler's critique of sex-as-substance illegitimately slides into a voluntarist constructivism by treating the instability of signification as evidence for the incompleteness of sexual being itself; against this, Copjec advances the Lacanian/Freudian thesis that sex is produced not by the success but by the *internal limit* of signification—its constitutive failure—and that the antinomy this generates cannot be resolved by either the dogmatic-structuralist or the skeptical-constructivist solution.

    Are the alternatives offered here—sex is substance/ sex is signification—the only ones available? And if not, what else might sex be?

30. #30

    Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.231

    <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c17_r1.xhtml_page_224" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="224"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c17_r1.xhtml_page_225" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="225"></span>*17*

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys a phenomenological account of psilocybin-induced mystical revelation to articulate a process theology in which God is not a static Substance but a "work in progress" co-constituted through subjective experience, and in which negation/death is paradoxically the condition of love's self-realization — a move that implicitly mobilises Hegelian dialectics (Aufhebung, Spirit coming to itself) and Lacanian motifs (loss as the condition of the re-encounter with the lost object) within an autobiographical register.

    Contrary to the received view of God as the eternal, unchanging Substance, it is a vision of an incomplete God, the spirit of perfect openness to existence

31. #31

    The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.37

    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 union between self-consciousness and substance or faith thus remains external; it is 'a hypocrisy, . . . the hero who appears before the onlookers splits up into his mask and the actor, into the person in the play and the actual self'

32. #32

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.88

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **Obscured Reduction and Abstract Naturalization**

    Theoretical move: Political economy's reduction of the worker to an animal paradoxically depends on a specifically human capacity for limitless self-reduction (the 'voided animal'), and by naturalizing this act of reduction it simultaneously naturalizes property relations, abstract exchangeability, and temporality itself—abolishing historical time in favour of the eternal repetition of the natural present.

    man will always already have been a 'voided animal' – an animal without any (animal) substance proper.

33. #33

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.137

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **Theory of Labor**

    Theoretical move: Against humanist-Marxist "dis-alienation," the passage argues—via a Hegelian reading—that alienation is constitutive of labor itself, not an external distortion to be overcome; "reconciliation" therefore means accepting the subject's loss of control over its own production, and communism cannot be conceptualized as the reappropriation of alienated substance.

    we should unequivocally reject all attempts to understand communism (the just society) as the reconciliation of the subject with its (alienated) substance.

34. #34

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.119

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **Dialectics for Marx**

    Theoretical move: Against Postone's historicist reduction of dialectics to capitalism's lifespan, the passage argues that dialectics acquires a transhistorical, retroactive logic: social forms outlive their conditions of production, and the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic operates not chronologically but retrospectively, with the present 'creating' the past and capital functioning as Hegelian Subject-Substance.

    The entire exchange of commodities in the capitalist form, then, is the self-movement of capital. Here we have Hegel's notion of Subject, also as a Substance.

35. #35

    Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.60

    *Unexpected Reunions* > **The Phenomenal In-Itself**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian/OOO framework for accessing the In-itself remains trapped in a masculine (phallic) logic of exception, while a Hegelian-Lacanian "feminine" (not-all) logic reveals the In-itself not as a transcendent beyond but as the very cuts and inconsistencies within phenomena—cuts that mark the inscription of a desubstantialized, non-actant subject defined as "that which in the Real suffers from the signifier."

    What happens in the passage from substance to subject is thus a kind of reflective reversal: we pass from the secret core of an object inaccessible to other objects to inaccessibility as such.

36. #36

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.119

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The fourth antinomy (of necessary being or not)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sexual difference is not a difference between two species of a universal but a meta-difference that splits universality from within, and he homologizes this structure to Kant's transcendental, which is itself traversed by immanent antinomies and transcendental illusion—culminating in the Kantian paralogism that prefigures Lacan's distinction between the barred subject of the signifier and the imaginary ego as object.

    The major premise provides the general definition of substance … it is illegitimate to apply the concept of substance to the I since this concept can only be applied to empirical objects in reality

37. #37

    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.

    'subject' is the name for a crack in the edifice of Being. This dimension gets lost in Fichte and Schelling who both assert intellectual intuition as the solution.

38. #38

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.51

    **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 the Sadean dream of a "second death" as radical external annihilation misrecognises what Lacan (and Hegel) identify as already primordial: the subject IS the second death, the immanent negativity/inconsistency internal to Substance itself; and this same error—presupposing an ontologically consistent Whole—recurs in Western Marxism (Ilyenkov, Bloch), while Adorno's "negative dialectics" and "primacy of the objective" approximate but do not fully reach the Lacanian distinction between symbolically-mediated reality and the impossible Real.

    the Sadean Nature remains a Substance, Sade continues to grasp reality only as Substance and not also as Subject, where 'subject' does not stand for another ontological level different from Substance but for the immanent incompleteness-inconsistency-antagonism of Substance itself

39. #39

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.347

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [Madness, Sex, War](#contents.xhtml_ahd22)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "abstract negativity" (madness, sexuality, war) is not an accidental excess to be sublated but a constitutive, immanent remainder that persists at the heart of every ethical and ontological edifice; the Möbius-strip topology of this persistence means that the barbaric core sustaining civilization cannot be simply overcome by expanding rational order, and Hegel's own failure to follow through on this insight (in sexuality and in his conservative politics) reveals the limit of any synthesis from Substance to Subject.

    the standard 'Hegelian' scheme of death (negativity) as the subordinate/mediating moment of Life can only be sustained if we remain within the category of Life whose dialectic is that of the self-mediating Substance returning to itself from its otherness

40. #40

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.239

    **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 > [The “Inner Eight”](#contents.xhtml_ahd14)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kant-to-Hegel move requires understanding the form/content gap as itself reflected back into content as "primordial repression," and maps this onto Lacan's sexuation formulas (form = non-all, matter = universal with exception), ultimately driving toward the cross-cap as the topological figure adequate to a radical antagonism irreducible to the Möbius strip.

    negativity as pure form has to be conceived as inherent to substance, as its own void.

41. #41

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.20

    **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: The passage argues that the gap between subject and Absolute should not be overcome but transposed into the Absolute itself—following Hegel's move of showing that the subject's lack is simultaneously the lack in the Other (substance's self-disparity), a structure Žižek identifies as the speculative core of both Hegel's idealism and Christianity's kenotic theology, and which he claims is what makes Marxism truly materialist rather than idealist.

    Thus what seems to happen outside of it, to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and Substance shows itself to be essentially Subject.

42. #42

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.138

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [The Sexed Subject](#contents.xhtml_ahd9)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that subjectivity is constitutively sexed by mapping the Kantian mathematical/dynamic antinomy onto Hegel's logic of Being/Essence, and then showing that each domain, when carried to its limit (via differential calculus as the paradigm case), self-sublates into a void that constitutes a distinct sexed subject: "feminine" subjectivity emerges from the self-sublation of the mathematical/Being domain, while "masculine" subjectivity emerges from the dynamic/Essence domain.

    the realization that there is nothing behind the veil of appearances but this Nothing itself, which enables the passage from Substance (S) to Subject ($).

43. #43

    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

44. #44

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian move of "substance as subject" is accomplished not through increased activity but through an empty, purely formal gesture — the signifier — by which the subject assumes/repeats as its own act what has already happened; and it demonstrates this through the funeral rite, the Fall, and culminates in reading the phallus as the Lacanian signifier of this formal conversion, the "unity of opposites" where radical bodily externality passes into pure interiority of thought.

    This is the way substance becomes subject: when, by means of an empty gesture, the subject takes upon himself the leftover which eludes his active intervention.

45. #45

    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).

    'substance' is the essence in so far as it reflects itself in the world of appearance, in phenomenal objectivity... and the 'subject' is substance in so far as it is itself split

46. #46

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that 'going through the fantasy' reveals the subject as the void/lack in the Other—not a hidden substantial Essence—and that appearance deceives precisely by pretending to deceive (dissimulating dissimulation). This is then mapped onto the Hegelian substance/subject distinction, exemplified through Stalinist and Yugoslav ideological deception, before pivoting to the Kantian Beauty/Sublimity dialectic as a matrix for reading Greek, Jewish, and Christian religion.

    the fundamental Hegelian distinction between substance and subject: the substance is the positive, transcendent Essence supposed to be hidden behind the curtain of phenomena

47. #47

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian "empty gesture" by which substance becomes subject—requiring a point of exception (Monarch, Christ) where free subjectivity is "quilted" into the substance—is the elementary operation of ideology itself: the symbolization of the Real that posits the big Other into existence; conversely, "subjective destitution" in analysis reverses this by accepting the non-existence of the big Other and keeping open the gap between Real and symbolization, at the cost of annulling the subject itself.

    the empty gesture, the act of formal conversion by means of which 'substance becomes subject'

48. #48

    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.

    the Hegelian Subject-Substance has nothing to do with any kind of mega-Subject controlling the dialectical process

49. #49

    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.

    the subject itself is the abrogated/cleansed substance, a substance reduced to the void of the empty form of self-relating negativity, emptied of all the wealth of 'personality'

50. #50

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.33

    Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek > Notes

    Theoretical move: This notes section anchors several key theoretical moves in the introduction: the non-substantial, beingless subject (manque à être), the relationship between subject and objet petit a as a cut/gap structured like a Möbius strip (fantasy formula), the critique of neovitalist/object-oriented ontology via Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism, and Lacan's alignment of his project with dialectical materialism against nominalism.

    subjects, although emerging from substance(s), come to be radically different from the 'natural' ontological grounds from which they arise and within which they operate.

51. #51

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.44

    Mladen Dolar > Hegel's Materialism

    Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Hegel's critique of substantiality constitutes a latent materialism: by demonstrating that matter is itself a product of thought (an abstraction, a *Gedankending*), Hegel does not dismiss matter but dissolves the very framework of substantiality—'substance is subject'—thereby opening the only path to a materialism worthy of its name, one that finds its psychoanalytic heir in the *objet petit a* as the subject's inscription into the Real rather than a correlate of consciousness.

    So, is matter a substance, the true substance of what there is? 'Substance,' the master-word of philosophy, aims at six interrelated features

52. #52

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.70

    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.

    'Reconciliation' between subject and substance means the acceptance of this radical lack of any firm foundational point.

53. #53

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.74

    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 absolute must be 'grasp[ed] . . . and express[ed] . . . not just as substance but just as much as subject'

54. #54

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.22

    Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

    Theoretical move: The subject is not a substance but a nonsubstantial, purely relational entity—the very wound/cut in the Real it attempts to heal—and any materialism or realism that posits a "democracy of objects" without accounting for this void at the core of subjectivity already relies on an unexamined transcendental constitution of reality; only a dialectical materialism that takes the subject as nothing but its own relationality and division can avoid this obfuscation.

    the subject is a nonsubstantial entity, an object that is entirely—indeed, is *perforce*—reducible to its relations to other entities.

55. #55

    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 equally both substance and subject because it mutually integrates subject (or concept) into substance, and substance into subject.

56. #56

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.50

    Mladen Dolar > Freud's Materialism

    Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Freud's departure from scientific materialism is not a rejection but a radicalization of it: by pushing mechanism, determinism, monism, reductionism, and scientism to their outermost consequences, psychoanalysis discovers a crack or inner break within each—a 'less than nothing' that persists without ontological substance—thereby converging, by an entirely different route, with Hegel's 'substance is subject.'

    doesn't it imply a matter which is not quite a substance, a matter that doesn't quite form a totality? Don't we rejoin here... the core of Hegel's adage 'substance is subject'?

57. #57

    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.

    This force flattens the ontological field to produce a subject that is substance, just one object 'among the various types of object.'

58. #58

    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 absolute Idea, as the equality of substance and subject, constitutes being and thinking into a single totality.

59. #59

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.135

    Adrian Johnston > Žižek continues:

    Theoretical move: Johnston defends Žižek's materialist position against Harman's idealist misreading by arguing that the denial of the world-as-whole is not anti-realism but a Hegelian move to include subjectivity within substance; simultaneously, Johnston defends his own neuro-psychoanalytic project against critics (Chiesa, Pluth) who wrongly cast interdisciplinary exchange as a zero-sum contest, and clarifies that positing continuity between the barred Real and the barred Symbolic does not collapse their distinction but reflects a dialectical identity-in-difference.

    Kant . . . confines himself to a one-sidedly incomplete ontology of substance by conceiving of subjectivity as entirely separate from substance.

60. #60

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.276

    Index > **INDEX**

    Theoretical move: This is a book index (pages 276–277) listing terms and proper names with page references; it contains no substantive theoretical argument of its own.

    substance, 4, 6, 8, 9–10, 12–13, 14, 16–17, 18, 26n35, 26n37, 31, 33, 36–39, 43, 47n14, 53–54...; as subject. See Hegel, G. W. F.

61. #61

    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 equality between subject and substance is the definitive aspect of the Idea. Dialectical materialism is not a regression into a realm of ideals

62. #62

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.96

    The Materialism of Historical Materialism

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx's "elemental materialism" — grounded in the concepts of dissolution (Auflösung) and element (stoicheion) — constitutes a counter-ideological, dialectical materialism distinct from both bourgeois philosophical materialism and reductive base/superstructure models; this elemental materialism is shown to be inherently Hegelian, treating the subject not as an identity but as a historically contingent form always at risk of dissolution back into substance.

    Marx says that the element is 'the substance of nature, out of which everything emerges, into which everything dissolves.'

63. #63

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.40

    Mladen Dolar

    Theoretical move: Dolar traces the modern philosophical coinage of "materialism" (Walch, 1726) to argue that the term was never a neutral classification but always a battle cry that places philosophy in a field of irresolvable antagonism—one in which materialism and idealism are not symmetrical alternatives to the same question, and any materialism that simply mirrors idealism's framework is already doomed to reproduce it. The proper grounding of materialism cannot bypass Hegel.

    Monism, as opposed to any kind of dualism. According to this principle, there is but one single substance to body and mind

64. #64

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.85

    The Philosopher's Stone > The Stone Breaks

    Theoretical move: By inverting Heidegger's ontological hierarchy, the passage argues that for Hegel it is the *subject* (not the stone) that is worldless, and this alienation from the world is the very condition of subjectivity's freedom and its capacity to enact—rather than merely suffer—contradiction; the stone's total immersion in the world explains both its erosion and its ontological distance from spirit.

    We know that the stone is not self-identical, that it is not an independent substance, because it is capable of breaking.

65. #65

    Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.17

    Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

    Theoretical move: Against new materialisms and realist ontologies, the passage argues for a Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism in which the subject—understood as the void of absolute negativity and identified with the Lacanian objet petit a—is not one object among others but constitutes the very hole in reality, such that "the hole in reality is the subject," and material reality is properly characterized as "non-all" rather than a fully constituted whole.

    everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject

66. #66

    The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.61

    <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **The Fleetingness of the Subject**

    Theoretical move: The subject of the unconscious is not a permanent substance but a fleeting, pulsating irruption that vanishes the moment it is represented by a signifier — the signifier substitutes for and thereby cancels the subject, whose only mode of being is as a breach in discourse.

    It is not some kind of underlying substance or substratum (hupokeimenon or subjectum).

67. #67

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.128

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

    Theoretical move: Žižek reads Henry James's late style as a literary enactment of the Hegelian passage from Substance to Subject, in which the nominalization of predicates desubstantializes the subject and the loss of ethical substance becomes the very condition for a higher, mediated ethics of intersubjective dependence—a move Žižek then generalizes into a "parallax gap" at the level of political antinomy.

    in the Hegelian passage from Substance to Subject, the substance (for example, at the social level, the ethical substance, the mores that sustain a way of life) does not disappear, it is just that its status changes

68. #68

    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.

    The passage from the Spinozan One qua the neutral medium/container of its modes and the One's inherent gap is the very passage from Substance to Subject.

69. #69

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.193

    **The Overlapping Worlds of Andrei Tarkovsky**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Tarkovsky's "cinema of intersection" achieves its distinctive effect by dramatically separating the worlds of desire and fantasy only to reveal their fundamental identity—that the objet petit a remains constant across both registers—thereby exposing the traumatic proximity of the gaze and dissolving the illusion of difference that sustains ordinary desiring subjectivity. This move is theorized as simultaneously Hegelian (identity-in-difference) and Lacanian (the drive's monotony beneath desire's metonymy).

    grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject

70. #70

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.46

    **Master/Slave Dialectic**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the dialectical logic running from Hegel's Master/Slave through the concept of Mediation to Kant's transcendental idealism, arguing that identity, recognition, and knowledge are never immediate but always the result of a mediating process — a dynamic that Lacan imports into the Imaginary as constitutive aggressivity and alienation.

    Furthermore, the living substance is the being that is in truth subject, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of self-positing.

71. #71

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.78

    **Substance**

    Theoretical move: The passage develops two interconnected theoretical moves: first, via Hegel, it establishes that substance is essentially subject through self-equality as thinking; second, and more extensively, it elaborates the paradoxical structure of the superego as simultaneously the law and its transgression, an obscene agency whose insatiable imperative is not prohibition but the command to enjoy (jouissance), drawing on Freud's two fathers (Oedipal and primal) to ground this contradiction.

    Because substance is in its own self subject, all content is its own reflective turn into itself.

72. #72

    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.

    It is subject that knows itself as the enduring substance of all things.

73. #73

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

    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>} > II

    Theoretical move: The passage (by Robert Pippin, critiquing Žižek's Hegel) argues that Žižek's Schellingian-Lacanian reading of Hegel—grounding subjectivity in an ontological "gap" or "rupture" in being—misreads the German Idealist tradition, which is better understood through Kant's apperception thesis: subjectivity is not a negative-ontological void but a self-conscious, norm-governed activity where action just *is* consciousness of action, requiring no appeal to a pre-transcendental gap or drive.

    when Hegel reminds us in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit that we must think 'substance' 'also as subject,' he does not... mean for us to think subject merely as an attribute of substance... The whole point of speculative idealism is to think substance as not-just-substance

74. #74

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.262

    Žižek Responds! > [Response to Nobus](#contents.xhtml_ch10a)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Kant's ethical ambiguity—between freedom as traumatic Real and freedom as asymptotically unattainable—mirrors the Sadean confusion about "second death," and both are resolved by the Hegelian-Lacanian move of grasping Substance as Subject (i.e., recognising that radical negativity/death drive is already the zero-level of reality, not a terminal destruction to be achieved).

    Sade continues to grasp reality only as Substance and not also as Subject, where 'subject' does not stand for another ontological level that is different from Substance, but for the immanent incompleteness-inconsistency-antagonism of Substance itself.

75. #75

    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 attempted synthesis of Schelling, Hegel, dialectical materialism, and quantum physics is internally inconsistent: the Schelling–quantum coupling licenses reductionism (either spiritualist or physicalist) incompatible with the strong-emergentist, anti-reductive, dialectical-materialist theory of autonomous subjectivity Žižek actually needs, which only a Hegelian "strong emergentism" can supply.

    the reduction of the Existence of spiritual subject to the Ground of natural substance (whether this Grund be Spinoza's natura naturans…)

76. #76

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.32

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's embrace of Schelling's ground-existence distinction implicitly endorses a Spinozistic metaphysics (natura naturans/natura naturata) that is irreducibly spiritualist and idealist, thereby undermining any materialist reading of Schelling's Naturphilosophie that Žižek might intend.

    Schelling likewise, in 1830's Einleitung in die Philosophie, rejects materialism as incompatible with his preferred dual-aspect monism hypothesizing a fundamental Identity underlying and cutting across the difference between the material and the spiritual.

77. #77

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.40

    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.

    one must conceive 'the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject' (das Wahre nicht als Substanz, sondern ebensosehr als Subjekt).

78. #78

    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.

    everything hangs on grasping and expressing the true not just as substance but just as much as subject... what appears selfsame and autonomous is just as riven with inconsistency and self-division as subjectivity

79. #79

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

    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>} > Notes

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section from Robert Pippin's critical essay on Žižek's Hegel, providing bibliographic citations and critical qualifications that elaborate Pippin's disagreements with Žižek's reading of Hegel—particularly around the subject-substance relation, self-consciousness, alienation, and the gap/negativity structure—without advancing a sustained independent argument.

    in what sense could the subject also be said to 'substantialize itself'? Negate itself as subject just by being substance?

80. #80

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

    Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Risks of Irony](#contents.xhtml_ch2) > Pippin on Žižek’s “Gappy Ontology”

    Theoretical move: The passage stages a debate between Žižek's "gappy ontology" — in which the subject as embodiment of negativity is the ontological ground of substance — and Pippin/Pittsburgh School's inferential pragmatism, arguing that Žižek's retroactive logic of the Act collapses the normative space of reasons and risks rendering all rational commitments contingent.

    the 'True' is not 'only as Substance, but equally as Subject.'