Secondary literature 2006

The Parallax View

Slavoj Žižek

by The Parallax View

Synopsis

Slavoj Žižek's The Parallax View (MIT Press, 2006) advances a systematic rehabilitation of dialectical materialism by developing the concept of "parallax" — the irreducible non-coincidence of the One with itself, the minimal gap that generates every appearance of opposition or antagonism — as the master-key to ontology, subjectivity, and political theory. The book argues that this gap is not symmetrical (two perspectives on the same neutral X) but constitutively asymmetric: one term always stands for the shift itself, for the void in the relation rather than for a positive content. Traversing three registers designated as stellar (ontological), solar (subjectivity and science), and lunar (politics), Žižek demonstrates that the parallax structure recurs identically in the Kantian antinomy, the Hegelian concrete universal, Lacanian sexuation (the not-All), Freudian drive versus desire, Marx's critique of political economy, neuroscience's gap between lived experience and "the open skull," and global capitalism's worldlessness. The central Hegelian-Lacanian wager is that these domains do not merely analogize one another but share a single topological structure — the Möbius-strip curvature by which immanence folds onto itself, generating a "third space" that is neither of the two poles yet is not a synthesis. Against postmodern relativism, deconstructionist ethics of the Other, Badiouian prescriptivism, and Hardt/Negri's Deleuzian multitude, the book insists that emancipatory politics must traverse the fantasmatic supplement of power and confront the Real of class antagonism as the "concrete universal" that over-determines every other antagonism — an insistence that terminates in the Bartleby gesture of subtraction and a defense of the revolutionary act as the only exit from the perverse social link of late capitalism.

Distinctive contribution

The Parallax View is distinctive within the Lacanian-Hegelian corpus for the sheer architectonic ambition with which it fuses ontological, cognitive-scientific, and political-economic registers under a single structural concept. Where most Lacanian interventions in political theory operate at the level of discourse theory (hegemony, subject-formation, fantasy), and where most Hegelian readings remain within the history of philosophy, Žižek here engages sustained chapters on the neuroscience of consciousness (Damasio, Dennett, Metzinger, Varela, Malabou), evolutionary theory (Miller's sexual-selection account of language), and the biopolitics of late capitalism — all under the common rubric of the parallax gap. The result is that Lacanian categories such as objet petit a, the not-All, and the drive are shown to have purchase in philosophy of mind and biology, not merely in clinical or cultural theory. This is the book in which Žižek most explicitly theorizes the concept of "dialectical materialism" as a positive philosophical position rather than a term of abuse, and where the case against reductionist neuroscience and against "immaterialist" New Age appropriations of quantum physics is argued on properly philosophical grounds via Lacan's formulas of sexuation applied to the question of matter itself.

A second distinctive contribution is the book's treatment of ideology and politics in Part III, which goes considerably beyond Žižek's earlier The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Plague of Fantasies by theorizing the historicity of Lacan's four discourses, the "worldlessness" of global capitalism as a structural condition for today's superego injunction to enjoy, and the culture-war/class-war displacement in US populist conservatism. The extended reading of Schumann's "Humoresque" as a model for ideology's obscene supplement — the absent melodic voice that structures what is actually played — is a formally inventive move that translates the ideological-supplement thesis into musicological terms not found elsewhere in the corpus. Similarly, the reading of The Matrix trilogy as an allegory of jouissance-appropriation under Capital, and the Christological reading of the difference between perverse and genuine sacrifice, integrate film analysis, political economy, and theology into a single argument in a way that is more systematically argued than in Žižek's more essayistic works.

Main themes

The parallax gap as the minimal ontological structure of all antagonism and non-coincidence
Hegelian concrete universality as the site of irreducible structural deadlock rather than a synthesis of particulars
Dialectical materialism rehabilitated against New Age polarity-thinking and reductionist neuroscience
The not-All logic of sexuation as the ontological condition of a genuinely non-reductionist materialism
Drive versus desire: the 'stuckness' of the drive as the specifically human dimension, not an infinite longing for the Thing
Global capitalism as structurally 'worldless', generating a superego injunction to enjoy that replaces ideological narrative
Culture war as class war in a displaced mode: the concrete universal of class struggle overdetermining all other antagonisms
The four discourses and their historical sequence: from the Master through University and Hysteria to the Analyst's discourse — and the perverse civilization that mimics the Analyst's formula
The obscene supplement of power: the fantasmatic underside that sustains explicit symbolic law, from the Decalogue to totalitarian regimes
The Bartleby gesture of subtraction as the proper political response to the perverse social link of late capitalism

Chapter outline

Introduction: Dialectical Materialism at the Gates — p.6-18
Chapter 1: The Subject, This 'Inwardly Circumcised Jew' — p.19-68
Chapter 2: Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology — p.68-126
Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism of Henry James — p.124-144
Chapter 3: The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit — p.145-250
Chapter 4: The Loop of Freedom — p.203-258
Interlude 2: Objet Petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism — p.253-272
Chapter 5: From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Power — p.273-326
Chapter 6: The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie It — p.330-385

Chapter summaries

Introduction: Dialectical Materialism at the Gates (p.6-18)

The introduction opens with two anecdotes — the use of Kandinsky and Dalí as instruments of torture in 1930s Barcelona, and the alleged Stalinist assassination of Walter Benjamin — to establish the book's governing motif: the "impossible short circuit" of levels that structurally cannot meet (high culture and base politics, theory and murder). From this Žižek extracts his central philosophical wager: rather than the New Age polarity of yin-yang opposites, dialectical materialism names the inherent "tension, gap, non-coincidence of the One with itself," which Žižek designates with the term parallax. The introduction surveys the entire range of domains in which this gap appears: quantum wave-particle duality, the neuroscientific "open skull" (there is no one at home), ontological difference (the gap between ontic and ontological that is irreducible in both directions), the Lacanian Real as pure antagonism, the gap between desire and drive, the parallax of the unconscious (between interpretation of formations and the theory of drives), and — provocatively — the parallax of the vagina. Philosophy itself, Žižek argues, emerged in the Greek polis precisely as the thought of those in a parallax position, unable to identify with any positive social identity. The strategic claim is that this "minimal difference" is closer to Derrida's différance than to standard dialectical contradiction — but Žižek immediately distances himself from the democracy-to-come deconstructionist camp, insisting on the specifically materialist and political stakes of the concept.

Key concepts: Parallax gap, Dialectical materialism, Real, Not-all, Ontological difference, Minimal difference Notable examples: Alphonse Laurenčič's 'psychotechnic' torture cells using Kandinsky and Dalí; Walter Benjamin's alleged Stalinist assassination; Quantum wave-particle duality

Chapter 1: The Subject, This 'Inwardly Circumcised Jew' (p.19-68)

Karatani's reading of Marx as a Kantian is the pivot for the political-economic section: the opposition between Ricardo's labor theory and Bailey's relational theory of value is treated as a Kantian antinomy, and the parallax reading insists on holding both — value must originate in production AND in circulation — without resolving them. Post-Marx Marxism (both Social Democratic and Communist) regressed to unilateral elevation of production, falling into the fetishism-critique trap. Žižek's reading of commodity fetishism distinguishes it sharply from the drive: drive is not an infinite longing for the Thing that fixes itself onto a partial object, but is this very fixation — the libidinal "stuckness" to a repeating circuit. The chapter closes with a reading of Marx on the passage from money to capital (C-M-C becoming M-C-M), arguing that the "madness of the miser" is not an aberration but the inherent truth of capitalism revealed in crisis, when money becomes the only true commodity. The inwardly circumcised Jew is thus the subject of capital: internally defined by the pure relation to exchange-value, stripped of all use-value substance.

Key concepts: Parallax object, Objet petit a, Master-Signifier, Concrete Universal, Retroactive Positing of Presuppositions, Drive Notable examples: Marx's 'inwardly circumcised Jews' passage in Capital; Lévi-Strauss's Winnebago village spatial diagrams; Anti-Semitism as Master-Signifier production; Korean DMZ theater window; Buenos Aires 2001 uprising (Cavallo wearing his own mask)

Chapter 2: Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology (p.68-126)

The Comedy of Incarnation section uses a Greimasian semiotic square to map the positions of Analyst, Christ, Teacher, and Scientist: Christ and the analyst both immediately are their function rather than merely performing it, the difference being that Christ's being is grounded in ontological reality (he is divine) while the analyst's is an effect of transference. The Star Wars reading argues that the saga fails precisely because it does not stage Anakin's turn to Evil as the outcome of excessive attachment to the Good — the properly Hegelian (and Christian) insight that it is our very excessive care that generates the diabolic foundation of the Good. The closing sections on Kafka's Odradek and Chaplin's City Lights both theorize the excessive, undead partial object — jouissance as "that which serves nothing" — as the specifically human form of drive excess, irreducible to any narrative of finitude. The chapter's theological dimension culminates in the argument that the Christological task is to change the modality of our being-stuck in drive so as to open the space of sublimation.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Drive, Sublimation, Jouissance, The Act, Splitting of the Subject, Semblance Notable examples: Bobby Peru scene in David Lynch's Wild at Heart; Claudel's The Hostage (Sygne de Coufontaine); Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (Isabel Archer); Tarkovsky's Sacrifice and Nostalgia; Kafka's Odradek; Chaplin's City Lights whistle scene; Star Wars III / Darth Vader

Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism of Henry James (p.124-144)

James's The Golden Bowl is read as the structural inversion of Wings: where Kate is ethical, Maggie is not. Maggie's maneuvering to maintain social appearances endorses a false ethics of the unspoken, and the novel ends in "a great moral crash" (Pippin). The chapter also engages the Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell as an artist of the parallax view in the political sense: his life split between Ystad and Maputo enacts the irreducible non-relation between First World late-capitalist alienation and raw Third World poverty, with no neutral language of translation possible between the two. The political lesson of the interlude is that only by maintaining fidelity to this split — refusing both the cynicism of exclusive First World focus and the escapism of privileging "real" Third World problems — can we achieve insight into the totality of today's world constellation.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Fantasy, The Act, Splitting of the Subject, Méconnaissance, Enunciation vs Statement Notable examples: Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (Kate Croy, Densher, Milly Theale); Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Maggie Verver, Charlotte); Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Isabel Archer); Henning Mankell (Ystad/Maputo parallax); Film: Before Sunset (unexpected ending as point de capiton); Film: 3:10 to Yuma

Chapter 3: The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit (p.145-250)

The theology sections read Luther's excremental identity of man ("divine shit") as the key to Protestant Christianity: only within this logic can the Incarnation be properly grasped — God freely identifies with his own excrement. This Protestant excremental turn is then traced to two consequences: scientific naturalization of man, and the elevation of jouissance to a central ethico-political category. The desublimated superego injunction to enjoy (jouissance of the Other, the subject-supposed-to-enjoy) is analyzed via the brain-machine interface experiments at Duke University and Lacan's "point of the apocalypse" — the saturation of the Symbolic by the Real of jouissance that direct neural stimulation threatens to bring about. Nietzsche's eternal return is tested against this horizon and found to remain within the logic of desire, not drive. The chapter closes with an extended engagement with cognitive science (Damasio, Dennett, Metzinger, Varela, Malabou) to locate the Hegelian-Lacanian subject in the gap between the organism's transparent self-model and the void of the observing function — the cave is empty, yet the cave's act of projecting itself is a positive ontological fact.

Key concepts: Real, Sublimation, Jouissance, Surplus-jouissance, Fantasy, Symbolic, Objet petit a, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata; Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony; Plato's cave allegory (re-read via Hegel); Budapest monument to liberation (Horthy/Voroshilov parallax); Duke University brain-machine interface experiments; Gerhard Richter's paintings; Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered (Pavka/octopus); Film: 2001: A Space Odyssey

Chapter 4: The Loop of Freedom (p.203-258)

The cognitivist sections (Dennett's pandemonium model, Damasio's second-order mapping, Metzinger's transparent self-model) are all subjected to the same immanent critique: they can account for the content of consciousness but not for the void of the observing function itself. Metzinger's cave-that-projects-itself generates a vicious circle: while the cave can simulate the content of the observer, it cannot simulate the observer's function, which is a positive ontological fact and not a fiction. Žižek's solution is to transpose the epistemological gap (consciousness is inexplicable from outside) into an ontological condition: the subject is the very ontological incompleteness of reality, the crack in the Real that makes reality "not-All." The chapter closes by connecting this to the Kantian-Schellingian problematic of radical Evil and the primordial, unconscious act of choice by which a subject constitutes its character — a non-phenomenal, atemporal act that is the subject's deepest freedom precisely because it is unconscious.

Key concepts: Retroactive Positing of Presuppositions, Splitting of the Subject, Objet petit a, Unconscious, The Act, Drive, Void, Méconnaissance Notable examples: Film: Minority Report (Anderton's act); Cartoon falling-cat paradox; Benjamin Libet free-will experiments; Varela's autopoiesis (cell membrane bootstrap); Dennett's Conway's Life cellular automaton ('gliders', 'eaters'); Metzinger's transparent self-model / cave projection; Damasio's second-order mapping critique; Geoffrey Miller's sexual-selection account of human intelligence

Interlude 2: Objet Petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism (p.253-272)

Against Hardt and Negri's identification of "democracy" as the common denominator of all emancipatory movements, Žižek argues that this is an ideologically non-neutral move (entirely foreign to their Deleuzian paradigm) that forecloses the question of the proper form of emancipatory politics. Against Laclau/Mouffe, whose position amounts to Bernstein's "goal is nothing, movement is all," Žižek argues that the foreclosure of the radical cut (in the name of the irreducible finitude of the political) itself has a utopian point — the fantasy of a politics without essentialism. Against Agamben's biopolitical closure (the state of exception as the truth of the West), Žižek argues that the knot of Law and violence is already untied in postpolitical societies, producing a split between impotent globalized interpretation and raw uncontained violence. The slum as the emergent counter-class to the symbolic class of executives, journalists, and academics is proposed as the site of new social awareness.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Not-all, Ideology, The big Other, Concrete Universal, Master Signifier, Surplus-jouissance Notable examples: Jean-Claude Milner on Europe and the Jews; Hardt and Negri, Empire and Multitude; Laclau and Mouffe's hegemony theory; Agamben's biopolitics; Film: Rashomon (Lévi-Straussian myth-matrix reading); US Florida election (majority counts as all); Stalinist voting paradox (unanimity with large majority)

Chapter 5: From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Power (p.273-326)

The biopolitical section analyzes the shift from Oedipal desire (Law and transgression) to post-Oedipal demand addressed to an omnipotent Other outside Law: late capitalism's unprecedented permissiveness does not simply abolish limitation but confronts the subject directly with the Limit as such, making satisfaction impossible. The historicity of Lacan's four discourses is deployed to map European modernity: the Master's discourse corresponds to absolute monarchy, the University discourse to expert biopolitical rule (Homo sacer, the administered world), the Hysteric's discourse to capitalist self-revolutionizing, and the Analyst's discourse to revolutionary-emancipatory subjectivity. Jacques-Alain Miller's provocative claim — that today's civilization itself fits the Analyst's discourse formula (surplus-enjoyment as agent addressing the divided subject) — is engaged critically: if civilization already mimics the Analyst's discourse, what distinguishes psychoanalysis from the perverse social link?

Key concepts: Ideology, Surplus-jouissance, The big Other, Superego, Jouissance, Drive, Desire, Dialectics, Badiouian Event, Master Signifier Notable examples: Heidegger's Nazi political engagement; Heidegger on the German army in Norway (filmed paratroops as 'metaphysical act'); Stalinist purges (Fitzpatrick, Getty/Naumov); Jože Jurančič building a monument to himself as prisoner; Film: Nixon (Stone's film as the last Oedipal politician); Argentinian liberal political imagination (El matadero); The Matrix trilogy (jouissance as political stake)

Chapter 6: The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie It (p.330-385)

The Robert Schumann "Humoresque" section offers the chapter's most formally inventive theoretical move: ideology operates like the absent melodic voice in Schumann's score — the explicit ideological text is sustained by an unplayed, virtual obscene supplement that structures what is actually heard. To critique ideology properly is to intervene in this unplayed layer, to "move the underground," rather than to engage the explicit symbolic Law. The Abu Ghraib torture photos are read not as aberrations but as the direct materialization of the obscene supplement of US military culture — the initiatic ritual of humiliation that sustains the community's explicit democratic-liberal self-image. The chapter closes with a political typology distinguishing between non-revolutionary situations (where local problems can be addressed while the Big Problem is deferred) and revolutionary situations (where even local problems cannot be solved without tackling the systemic deadlock directly) — and argues that the Badiouian prescriptive logic of directly positing an axiom as already realized is the formal indicator of proximity to a revolutionary situation. The culture-war analysis demonstrates that class struggle is the "concrete universal" over-determining all other antagonisms (race, religion, gender) — populist conservatives are the symptomatic truth of liberal hypocrisy, and both are structured by capital's logic of expanding demand.

Key concepts: Ideology, Fetishistic Disavowal, Superego, Jouissance, The big Other, The Act, Concrete Universal, Symptom, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Badiouian Event Notable examples: Amish rumspringa practice; Schumann's 'Humoresque' (absent inner voice); Abu Ghraib torture photographs; Film: Taxi Driver (Travis Bickle's passage à l'acte); Film: The Fugitive (Harrison Ford / corporate capital displacement); Thomas Frank's analysis of Kansas populist conservatism; John Brown as saint of abolitionism; Jim Jones mass suicide at Jonestown; Jelinek's The Piano Teacher

Main interlocutors

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel, Science of Logic
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Marx, Capital
Lacan, Seminar XVII
Lacan, Seminar XX
Lacan, Seminar VII
Lacan, Ecrits
Lacan, Seminar XI
Kojin Karatani, Transcritique
Alain Badiou, Being and Event
Heidegger, Being and Time
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom
Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology
Hardt and Negri, Empire
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
Antonio Damasio
Francisco Varela
Thomas Metzinger
Catherine Malabou
Geoffrey Miller
Jean-Claude Milner
Étienne Balibar
Walter Benjamin
Kierkegaard
Nietzsche

Position in the corpus

The Parallax View occupies a singular position in the Lacanian-Hegelian corpus as Žižek's most architecturally ambitious attempt to unify his philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic commitments under a single ontological concept. It is best read after The Sublime Object of Ideology (which establishes the basic Lacanian-ideological framework) and The Ticklish Subject (which elaborates the Cartesian subject against Habermas, Heidegger, and Butler), since The Parallax View presupposes those arguments and significantly extends them. It shares significant ground with Tarrying with the Negative in its Hegelian orientation, and with The Indivisible Remainder in its engagement with Schelling; but it is more systematic than either. The extended engagement with cognitive neuroscience (Damasio, Dennett, Metzinger, Malabou) is unique in the Žižek corpus and has no close parallel elsewhere in the Lacanian secondary literature, making the book indispensable for readers interested in psychoanalysis and philosophy of mind. The political sections on the four discourses, the worldlessness of capitalism, and the culture-war-as-class-war argument develop themes from The Plague of Fantasies and Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle to their fullest elaboration.