Void

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (45)

1. #01

   Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.77

   Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?)

   Theoretical move: The passage proposes a Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of religion grounded in *das Ding* as the abyssally unknowable dimension of the Other, arguing that religious experience—paradigmatically prayer—is always an address to this void, and that different religious formations represent varying structural relationships to that abyss.

   every prayer is inevitably an echo in a Void. Otherwise said, every prayer resonates in the hollow of the Other-Thing.

2. #02

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

   <span id="Chapter14.htm_page145"></span>Nostalgia for Modernism: The Focus Group and Belbury Poly

   Theoretical move: Fisher argues that postmodern culture suppresses not darkness but luminosity/the numinous, and that certain minimalist electronic music (Foxx, Budd) succeeds in rendering a haecceitic, depersonalised encounter with the numinous that operates as a release from identity — a melancholic grace that ego psychology actively forecloses.

   the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace

3. #03

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

   <span id="Chapter3.htm_page62"></span>No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

   Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Joy Division's depression is not a mood but an ontological-philosophical position that operates beyond the pleasure principle—a Schopenhauerian diagnosis of the Will's obscene undead insatiability—and that what makes it theoretically distinct from ordinary sadness or rock nihilism is the total absence of an object-cause, making it structurally homologous to Lacanian melancholia while functioning as a dangerously seductive half-truth about the human condition.

   Joy Division always sounded as if they had experienced one too many of those desolating voidings, so that they could no longer be lured back onto the merry-go-round

4. #04

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

   <span id="Chapter2.htm_page42"></span>Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

   Theoretical move: Fisher deploys hauntology as the master concept to read English art pop (Japan, Sylvian) and Tricky's music as sites where class anxiety, spectral identity, and the alien/android figure converge, arguing that identification with the alien/void — rather than authentic selfhood — is the politically charged gesture that links postpunk, art pop, and 1990s British music across racial and class lines.

   The replicant ('YOUR EYES RESEMBLE MINE…') is a speaking void. The scary thing about 'Aftermath' is that it suggests that nowadays WE ALL ARE. Speaking voids, made up only of scraps and citations…

5. #05

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

   <span id="Chapter3.htm_page62"></span>No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

   Theoretical move: Fisher uses Joy Division as a cultural symptom—their music indexes the threshold moment (1979–80) when social-democratic, Fordist modernity collapsed into neoliberal control society, arguing that the band's depressive, catatonic expressionism is not merely aesthetic but diagnostic of a historically specific breakdown of subjectivity, community, and futurity.

   I realised then that I could never go back to that happiness. So there's this void.

6. #06

   A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.78

   chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice

   Theoretical move: The acousmatic voice structurally resists 'disacousmatization': its source is constitutively concealed, meaning ventriloquism is not an exception but the very condition of voice as object—the voice emerges precisely in the void from which it supposedly stems, operating as both surplus-of-body and no-more-body (plus-de-corps), and thus as the operator of the impossible division between interior and exterior.

   the ultimate stage is finally reached when one actually sees the orifice, the bodily aperture, from which the voice is coming, the mouth. That is: when one sees the gap, the crack, the hole, the cavity, the void, the very absence of phallus.

7. #07

   A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.131

   The voice and the drive > The voice and the letter

   Theoretical move: The voice occupies the structural position of sovereignty (inside/outside the law simultaneously), functioning as a permanent threat of a "state of emergency" within the symbolic order; this topology extends to psychoanalysis, where the analyst's silence incarnates the object voice as a pure enunciation compelling the subject's response—making the voice the pivot of transference and of political, ethical, and linguistic subjectification alike.

   This location—the intersection, the void—turns the voice into something precarious and elusive, an entity which cannot be met in the full sonority of an unambiguous presence, but is not simply a lack either.

8. #08

   A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.205

   Notes > Chapter 3 The "Physics" of the Voice

   Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus advances several interlocking theoretical arguments: the drive's aim/goal distinction (via Lacan) explains why the oral drive circles an eternally lacking object rather than reaching satisfaction; the acousmatic voice is shown to be structurally tied to phantomology when seen/heard fail to coincide; and the trompe-l'œil/lure distinction illuminates how deception operates at the level of the sign rather than verisimilitude.

   'entre le vide et l'événement pur.'

9. #09

   A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.169

   Silence

   Theoretical move: The analyst's silence does not simply oppose lalangue but is its structural flip side: by creating a void in which the analysand's speech resonates through the loop of the Other, silence dispossesses the voice, returning the message of desire as the voice of the drive, and this trajectory—from subject-supposed-to-know through fantasy to the object voice—is the path of analysis itself, culminating in la passe.

   its importance is merely topological, it consists in the formation of a void, a cavity, an empty space, of 'the most elementary form of a constituted and constituting void [le vide]'

10. #10

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.191

    Silence > The dog

    Theoretical move: By reading Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog," Dolar traces how the acousmatic voice-from-nowhere (objet petit a as pure resonance) converges with the enigma of food to identify objet petit a as the common-source intersection of voice and nourishment—both passing through the mouth in mutual exclusion—while also theorising psychoanalysis as the abandonment of childhood rather than its retrieval.

    It is as if the pure void of the Other started to reverberate in itself in the presence of those great musicians, whose art consisted merely in letting the Other resonate for itself.

11. #11

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.51

    chapter 2 > Voice and presence

    Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the object voice, far from grounding a "metaphysics of presence" (as Derrida's deconstruction of phonocentrism might imply), introduces an irreducible rupture at the core of narcissistic self-presence: the voice is not the transparent medium of auto-affection but harbors an alien, Real kernel—the object voice—that makes the subject possible only through an impossible relation to what cannot be present.

    it refers it to a void—but a void which is not simply a lack, an empty space; it is a void in which the voice comes to resonate.

12. #12

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.111

    4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Lures of Power*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's two "lures of power"—reifying the void and absolutizing truth—are countered by the structural incompleteness of naming, and that this incompleteness aligns Badiou with Lacan's insistence on an unbridgeable gap between the Real and its symbolization, while also positioning sublimation ethics as a superior framework for both personal and social transformation.

    If the event reveals the 'impossible' void of a situation, naming gradually renders this impossibility into an alternative situational possibility.

13. #13

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.216

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *But Still . . .*

    Theoretical move: The passage critiques Badiou's and Žižek's neo-Marxist universalism by arguing that their attempt to situate universality within event-specific "voids" fails to escape hegemonic power differentials, since the naming of the void itself remains a site of contested authority that systematically excludes feminist, anti-racist, and queer struggles.

    Who gets to name the void of the situation? Is it, to resort to a 'true-to-life' example, the valiant male 'warriors' of the socialist revolution? Or the women who serve them coffee?

14. #14

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.181

    8. *The Sublimity of Love*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that romantic love is the paradigmatic site where the lost Thing exerts its greatest force: the beloved object functions as a sublime morsel of the real that promises unmediated jouissance, and the idiosyncratic "language of desire" born from primordial loss can either imprison the subject in narcissistic repetition or open onto genuine love and interpersonal generosity depending on whether the subject holds desire alive or forecloses it.

    it aligns our ability to light up specific objects with our willingness to hold the void of our being open even when we might feel tempted to close it artificially.

15. #15

    The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.54

    <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > From the void without to the void within

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the eschatological kingdom is not a future arrival but a spectral presence already "to come" within the present — an interior void that ruptures the text, the beloved, and the world from within rather than from without — and uses this structure to reframe theological transcendence as radical immanence.

    the text itself is rent by an interior eschatological void that can never be rendered whole and accessible to us.

16. #16

    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.

17. #17

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.282

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics is structurally homologous to the Lacanian concept of symbolic registration by the big Other, and further proposes a three-level ontology (quantum Real, abyssal Void, macroscopic reality) modeled on the Klein bottle, where the collapse of the wave function is not an anomaly but constitutive of quantum reality itself — with the 'snout' of the Klein bottle retroactively producing the 'mollusk' of the Real.

    there is a third level, the abyssal Void through which pre-ontological Real is transubstantiated into macroscopic reality

18. #18

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.170

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a truly radical materialism must be non-reductionist—not "everything is matter" but "there is nothing which is not matter"—which, via Lacan's formulas of sexuation (the not-All), opens space for immaterial phenomena to have a specific positive nonbeing; and that the Badiouian Event must be understood not as a Beyond of Being but as the very curvature/non-self-coincidence of Being itself, which Žižek aligns with the parallax gap and the logic of the non-All.

    'All there is' is the interstice, the non-self-coincidence, of Being, that is, the ontological nonclosure of the order of Being.

19. #19

    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.

    every understanding is a contingent 'projecting' of a link over a gap, not a direct apprehension. The transcendental 'condition of possibility' is thus the obverse of the condition of impossibility

20. #20

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.152

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject of the unconscious has the structure of a Kierkegaardian apostle—a pure formal function of impersonal Truth rather than an expression of ego or id—and that the "Thing from Inner Space" (which modern art strains toward beyond the pleasure principle) is not the Kantian Thing-in-itself but rather the site of the direct inscription of subjectivity into reality, emerging through fantasy-staging of what is "actually" a rational phenomenon.

    The subject proper is empty, a kind of formal function, a void which remains after I sacrifice my ego.

21. #21

    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.

    we cannot accept the empty place (of the impossible Universality, the place to be filled in—'hegemonized'—by contingent particulars) as the ultimate given; we should hazard a step further and ask how—through what cut in the texture of the living body—this empty place itself emerges.

22. #22

    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 if the 'subject' is nothing but the void, the gap, opened up by the failure of reflection? What if all the figures of positive self-acquaintance are just so many secondary 'fillers' of this primordial gap?

23. #23

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.23

    The Kantian Parallax

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues, via Karatani's reading of Kant, that the "parallax view" names an irreducible structural gap between positions that cannot be synthesized or reduced; he then radicalises this by showing that transcendental subjectivity, freedom, and ontological difference all inhabit precisely this "third space" between phenomenal and noumenal—a space structurally homologous to the Lacanian Real as pure antagonism and to the Not-all logic of sexuation.

    the transcendental object is the void beyond phenomenal appearances, while the transcendental subject already appears as a void.

24. #24

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.103

    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.

    an empty container of a multitude of inconsistent, even mutually exclusive, meanings

25. #25

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.39

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegelian concrete universality is not a peaceful synthesis of particularities but is itself the site of an irreducible antagonism or "inherent gap of the One," such that particular forms are failed attempts to resolve the universal's self-contradiction — a logic that surpasses both Kantian moral abstraction and Laclau's externally opposed logics of difference and antagonism.

    the gap between One and the Void ... the Void of its own place of inscription

26. #26

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.243

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > From Physics to Design?

    Theoretical move: Žižek uses Dennett's dual-ontology (physics/design) and intentional-stance framework as a foil to argue that consciousness is constitutively negative—its power lies in abstraction, delay, and the ability to veto—thereby mobilising Hegel's infinite negative power of Understanding against eliminativist and adaptationist accounts of mind, while exposing the covert teleology (quasi-Kantian regulative idea, fetishistic disavowal) lurking in Darwinian naturalism.

    without it, we would be totally suffocated by billions of data with, in a way, no empty breathing space around us, directly part of the world.

27. #27

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.157

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the parallax structure—a purely formal minimal difference that inscribes the subject's gaze into the perceived object—is the shared logic of aesthetics (Richter, Pizarnik, Kalevala), psychoanalytic topology (objet petit a, death drive, sublimation), and political philosophy (Hegel's 'compromise' with post-Thermidorian reality vs. Hölderlin's Beautiful Soul), thereby grounding the concept of 'Good as the absence of Evil' and of creative silence in a unified parallactic ontology.

    to encircle its place in the way a vase creates its central void

28. #28

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.109

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "Comedy of Incarnation" discloses the deepest logic of Hegelian dialectics: the parallax gap between God and man (Universal and Singular) is not sublated but transposed inward, so that Christ's direct coincidence of divinity and miserable humanity enacts the Hegelian move from abstract to concrete universality, where appearance emerges from the gap within the Real itself rather than from a hidden essence behind it.

    the 'primordial fact' is the noncoincidence of the Absolute with itself, the gap which traverses it from within, the inner split of the primordial Void itself

29. #29

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.228

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Emotions Lie, or, Where Damasio Is Wrong

    Theoretical move: By reading Damasio's neuroscience of consciousness through the lens of Fichte's Anstoss and Lacan's "answer of the Real," Žižek argues that the subject is not a substance but a self-generating narrative process, and that consciousness involves a constitutive parallax gap between inside and outside that cannot be closed from either side alone.

    we always encounter an entity that is simultaneously—with regard to the structure—an empty, unoccupied place and—with regard to the elements—an excessive occupant without a place.

30. #30

    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.

    ontological difference is not 'maximal,' between all beings, the highest genus, and something else/more/beyond, but, rather, 'minimal,' the bare minimum of a difference not between beings but between the minimum of an entity and the void, nothing.

31. #31

    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.

    a paradoxical insubstantial object that merely gives body to this relating 'as such'

32. #32

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.381

    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.

    nothing will have taken place but the place itself... to the gap that separates a something from nothing, from the void of its own place

33. #33

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.180

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Resistances to Disenchantment

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that neither the transcendental-philosophical defense of subjectivity nor the accommodationist strategy of finding neuronal correlates for psychoanalytic concepts constitutes an adequate response to the challenge of brain sciences; instead, psychoanalysis must locate itself within the brain sciences' own inherent silences and impossibilities, identifying the "absent Cause" of cognitivist accounts as the Freudian death drive / German Idealist self-relating negativity. Along the way, he maps four positions on consciousness through a Greimasian square and proposes a Badiouian framing of consciousness-emergence as Event.

    the more consciousness is demonstrated to be marginal, unnecessary, nonfunctional, the more it becomes enigmatic—here it is consciousness itself which is the Real of an indivisible remainder

34. #34

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.46

    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 subject is confronted not with constituted reality but with the spectral obscene proto-reality of partial objects floating around against the background of the ontological Void

35. #35

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.87

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

    Theoretical move: Žižek uses Lacan's reading of Claudel's *The Hostage* and James's *The Portrait of a Lady* to argue that the feminine "No" (Versagung) is not a signifying negation grounded in the paternal "No," but a bodily, excremental gesture of pure loss that enacts separation from the Symbolic—prefiguring the sinthome—and that this "No as such" (form without content) is the hidden materialist core linking Kierkegaard's infinite resignation to Hegelian speculative identity.

    The content of pure Meaning can only be negative: the Void, the absence of Meaning.

36. #36

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.66

    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: The passage argues that drive must be rigorously distinguished from desire: drive is not an infinite longing for the lost Thing that gets stuck on a partial object, but is itself the very fixation, the self-propelling loop of repetition that finds satisfaction in failure and endless circulation around the void. This distinction is then leveraged to reframe the debate between Lacan and Badiou on negativity and the Act, and to identify the curved structure of drive with Hegelian self-consciousness understood as a non-psychological, impersonal agency of registration — the big Other.

    in a drive, the "thing itself" is a circulation around the Void (or, rather, hole, not void)

37. #37

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.248

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

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Kantian/German Idealist Self-Consciousness (the empty point of pure reflectivity) is structurally identical to Lacan's subject of the Unconscious, and that this identity is confirmed by Kant-Schelling's notion of a primordial, atemporal act of choice: what phenomenal self-awareness experiences as imposed nature is in fact a radically unconscious free act, meaning Self-Consciousness itself is radically unconscious.

    the subject as the Void of pure reflectivity, as that X to which we can attribute (as his free decision) what, in our phenomenal self-awareness, we experience as part of our inherited or otherwise imposed nature.

38. #38

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.166

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

    Theoretical move: Žižek reframes the modern "humiliation" narrative (Copernicus-Darwin-Freud) by arguing that twentieth-century thought does not simply continue desublimating reduction but paradoxically rehabilitates appearance/Event as irreducible to positive Being—and that the true materialist wager is not reductionism but the capacity to explain mind, consciousness, and sexuality precisely where idealism fails, with Badiou's Event-logic shown to be structurally homologous to the Hegelian non-All.

    correlative to this loss of privilege is the emergence of the subject as the pure immaterial void, not as a substantial part of reality

39. #39

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.200

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the standard warnings about biogenetic/technological "danger" (Heidegger, Fukuyama, Habermas) are caught in a perspective fallacy—measuring the posthuman future by present standards of meaning—while a Lacanian inversion reveals that cognitivist self-objectivization causes anxiety not by foreclosing freedom but by confronting us with the abyss of our freedom and the radical contingency of consciousness.

    There must be a non-All, a gap, a hole, in reality itself, filled in by phenomenal experience.

40. #40

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.388

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

    Theoretical move: This notes section makes several concentrated theoretical moves: it maps the three meanings of "subject" onto the RSI triad; it redefines Lacan's anti-philosophy as an infinite (Kantian) judgment rather than a simple negation of philosophy; it traces the shift in Lacan's conception of the Real from extimate Thing to inherent inconsistency of the Symbolic; and it reads Messiaen's musical structure as isomorphic with Lacan's four discourse-elements, thereby illustrating the elementary signifying structure.

    there is nothing 'beyond,' the 'Beyond' is only the void of the impossibility/failure of its own representation

41. #41

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.324

    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.

    all of the multitude of Being can never be adequately represented in a State of Being, and an Event always occurs at the site of this surplus/remainder which eludes the grasp of the State.

42. #42

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.395

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 2Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section of The Parallax View, containing scholarly footnotes with citations and brief argumentative asides; the theoretically substantive moments include Žižek's critique of Boostels on Kant avec Sade, a gloss on Lacan's tripartite (ISR) staging of anxiety, and a reading of Medea vs. Antigone as two versions of feminine subjectivity.

    there is nothing left for her, she finds herself in the Void—the Void of self-relating negativity, of the 'negation of negation,' that is subjectivity itself.

43. #43

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.96

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

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian ethical revolution—which displaces all external authority onto autonomous self-limitation—makes the "Sadeian perversion" not Kant's hidden truth but rather his *symptom*: Sade emerges precisely from Kant's failure to follow his own breakthrough to the end, and the only genuine resolution of the hysteric's demand for a Master is the analytic position of subjective destitution.

    the uncanny abyss of freedom without any ontological guarantee in the Order of Being

44. #44

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.105

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

    Theoretical move: Žižek uses the Darth Vader/Anakin figure to argue that the subject in the strict philosophical sense is constituted not by a human face but by an "excessive" ethical commitment that founds rather than corrupts the Good, and that the spectral Voice is the privileged medium of this inhuman subjectivity; this is further extended into a provocation about theology and materialism.

    what gets lost is Vader as subject, the one who dwells in the void behind the black metal mask (not to be confused with the human face behind the mask)

45. #45

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.58

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Marxian "parallax" consists in the irreducible, non-synthesisable gap between the logic of economy (commodity-form as socio-transcendental a priori) and the logic of politics (antagonism), such that the bracketing which produces each domain is not merely epistemological but inscribed in "real abstraction" — and that post-Marxist "pure politics" (Badiou, Rancière, etc.) mistakes by reducing economy to an ontic sphere while Karatani's Kantianism fails to go beyond a transcendental X that leaves the fetishism of Power intact.

    the space of an Event is the minimal 'empty' distance between two beings, the 'other' dimension which shines through this gap.