The concrete universal in Žižek and Hegel

Žižek's reading of Hegel is, as he and many of his readers explicitly recognize, distinctly unorthodox. Efforts to appraise these readings often make reference to and mobilize the "real Hegel," a recognized standard and authorized understanding of Hegelian philosophy against which a particular interpretation may be compared and evaluated. This concept of "the real," which is utilized in one way or another by both adherents and critics, is rooted in fundamental ontological assumptions that are at least as old as Plato. Žižek's critical interventions in the ontology of the real expose these assumptions and contest their procedures and outcomes. In doing so, Žižek not only questions the metaphysical foundations of traditional forms of criticism but provides for an alternative approach for evaluating his own readings and interpretations. This essay applies Žižek's understanding of the Real to an evaluation of his reading of Hegelian philosophy. In doing so, it asks a number of related questions: Who or what gets to determine and authorize the "real Hegel?" What metaphysical propositions justify and legitimate these decisions? And what is at stake in continuing to operate according to these standards and protocols? In pursuing this investigation, the essay stages a critical reflection that not only reevaluates typical approaches to evaluation but sketches the basic contours of a distinctly Žižekian theory of reading and literary criticism.

Diacritics, 2008

near the end of a two-hour presentation at Calvin College in grand Rapids, michigan, on november 10, 2006, Slavoj Žižek confesses that, in terms of the intellectual ambitions nearest to his heart, "my secret dream is to be Hegel's luther" ["why only an atheist Can Believe"]. this confession comes just months after the publication of his latest major work, The Parallax View, a book described as a new magnum opus. there are ample justifications within this text to license retroactively rereading it through the lens of Žižek's subsequent public admission that he is now preoccupied with rescuing Hegel from the numerous misinterpretations to which this giant of german idealism (who casts such a long shadow over the Continental european philosophical tradition) has been repeatedly subjected over the past two hundred years. The Parallax View, at certain points explicitly and in other places implicitly, can be seen as centered on an effort to confront aggressively the various received versions of Hegel widely accepted as official and orthodox exegetical renditions. the motif of the "parallax gap," elaborated in a plethora of guises throughout this 2006 tome, condenses and reflects the axiomatic theses of what could be called Žižek's Hegelian reformation. the critical assessment of The Parallax View offered here seeks to go straight to its theoretical heart by highlighting a single line of argumentation running through the full span of this text's different moments and phases. Žižek's own Hegelian-style conceptions of truth (as fiercely partisan rather than calmly neutral) and universality (as immanently concrete rather than transcendently abstract) validate such an interpretive approach-"universal Truth is accessible only from a partial engaged subjective position" [Pv 35]. Deliberately extracting particular conceptual constellations and forcing them to link up with each other according to the plan of a certain directed philosophical agenda promises to be much more revealing of the essential features of Žižekian thought than a comprehensive survey of this latest of his major works. the specific argumentative thread to be isolated here is the new extended engagement with the terrain covered by cognitive science and the neurosciences. apart from the task of denouncing falsifying popular pictures of Hegel, one of Žižek's other driving ambitions in this book is the desire to formulate a fundamental ontology appropriate to the theory of subjectivity mapped out over the course of his entire intellectual itinerary (a theory informed by kant and post-kantian german idealism combined with lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology). and, herein, the articulation of such an ontology appropriately gets entangled, via reflections on the nature of the brain, with the latest instantiations of the perennial philosophical problem of the relationship between mind and

Pro-Fil, 2014

One of the standard critiques of Hegel, first formulated already by the "young Hegelians," concerns the apparent contradiction between Hegel's dialectical method and his system. While Hegel's method approaches reality in its dynamic development, discerning in every determinate form the seeds of its own destruction and self-overcoming, his system endeavors to render the totality of being as an achieved order in which no further development is in view. With the twentieth century interpreters of Hegel who stand under Heidegger's influence, this contradiction between the "logical" and the "historical" acquires a deeper radical underpinning: what they try to outline is a more fundamental ontological frame that is both the source of Hegel's dialectical systematizing, and is, simultaneously, betrayed by this systematizing. The historical dimension is here not simply the unending evolution of all life forms. It is also not the life-philosophical opposition between the young Hegel trying to grasp the historical antagonisms of social life and the old Hegel compulsively steamrolling all content with his dialectical machine, but the inherent tension between Hegel's systematic drive of notional selfmediation (or sublation) and a more original ontological project that, following Heidegger, Alexandre Koyre describes as the historicity of the human condition oriented towards future. 1 The root of what Hegel calls "negativity" is (our awareness of) future: future is what is not (yet), the power of negativity is ultimately identical to the power of time itself, this force that corrodes every firm identity. The proper temporality of a human being is thus not that of the linear time, but that of engaged existence: a man projects his future and then actualizes it by way of a detour through past resources. This "existential" root of negativity is obfuscated by Hegel's system that abolishes this primacy of the future and presents its entire content as the past "sublated" in its logical form-the standpoint adopted here is not that of engaged subjectivity, but of Absolute Knowing. (A similar critique of Hegel was deployed by Alexandre Kojeve and Jean Hyppolite.) What his critics all endeavor to formulate is a tension or antagonism in the very core of Hegel's thought that remains unthought by Hegel-not for accidental reasons, but by necessity, which is why, precisely, this antagonism cannot be dialecticized, resolved, or "sublated" through dialectical mediation. What all these philosophers offer is thus a critical "schizology" of Hegel. 2 It is not difficult to recognize in this vision of the future-oriented temporality of the engaged subject the traces of Heidegger's radical assertion of finitude as the unsurpassable predicament of being-human: it is our finitude that exposes us to the opening of the future, to the horizon of what is to come, i.e., transcendence and finitude are two sides of the same coin. No wonder then, that it was Heidegger himself who, in a series of seminars and written texts, proposed the most elaborate version of such a critical reading of Hegel. Since this is not the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), but the later Heidegger, he tries to decipher the unthought dimension of Hegel through the close reading of Hegel's notion of the "experience" (Erfahrung) of consciousness from his Phenomenology of Spirit. Heidegger reads Hegel's famous critique of ×

Filosofisk Supplement, 2010

Slavoj Žižek claims that when a true historical break occurs, there is an impossibility of return. What I hope to do in this paper is to provide an explication of Žižek's idea of a Return to Hegel. In the general sense, a return may only be possible when there is a successful act of departure. However, this act of departure may simply be an illusion—as in the case of Hegel, whose contemporaries (and rivals) Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Marx have proclaimed their post-Hegelian anti-philosophical break. When there is a false break, then the possibility of return is once again opened. I shall try to elucidate the idea in the following steps: 1) to give a generally accepted account of Hegel today; 2) to introduce Slavoj Žižek; 3) to dwell on the topic of return; and 4) to answer the question, " Is it still possible to be a Hegelian today? " I claim that Žižek's version of a Return to Hegel is manifested in three steps: return, repeat, and overcome. The act of return leads us back to examine closely the historical transition wherein we may find the theoretical fault somewhere along the line (leading us to dismiss Hegel as the " absolute idealist " who claimed to have possessed " absolute knowledge "). The act of repeating gives us a fresh take on the text of Hegel. Hence, Žižek's unorthodox reading of Hegel. The act of overcoming, as Žižek fondly describes, is " to become more Hegelian than the master himself. " This means that there is a need to read Hegel through contemporary lenses and context for him to fit in the contemporary era.

2018

When reading Slavoj Žižek, it does not take long to realize that Hegel’s philosophy is one of his most important theoretical points of departure. Unlike most other contemporary political theorists and thinkers, he does not even hesitate to call himself a Hegelian. In an interview from 2002, he says, for example, “even when I sometimes try to be critical of Hegel, I remain a Hegelian”.1 Like many other political radical Hegelians, Žižek is also in some way influenced by the theories of Marx as well as by Lenin and other later Marxist thinkers. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to regard him as an orthodox or traditional Marxist. Ian Parker is therefore right when he writes: “Žižek does indeed see traditional Marxism as out of date, no longer applicable to new conditions of global capitalism”, with the important addition, “and this does lead him back to Hegel”.2 Žižek’s readings of Hegel’s texts are based on Jacques Lacan’s theories of the subject and the unconscious, and less on Ma...

Abstract This paper draws together a complex assemblage of analysis, critique, and exemplification in its attempt to provide cogent argumentation for its claim that the notion of subjectivity, as championed by Kierkegaard, is immanent to the Hegelian system despite Kierkegaard's express claims otherwise. By simultaneously resisting and insisting on the schismatic differences between Hegel and Kierkegaard, this paper endeavors to illustrate what I allege to be a definite homology between Hegel's absolute Idea and Kierkegaard's concept of essential knowing, which together posit a subjectivity that is defined by the inherent tension of contradiction, and which makes up a particular "materialism" that inheres at the core of a disjunctive absolutism; the truth of which is the subject as such. The emergence of this consideration is to be located in a critico-theoretical conjunction of my own mustering, involving but not limited to Adrian Johnston's transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity, Kant's Thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), and the radical heterodoxy of Slavoj Žižek's dialectical-materialist hermeneutics of Hegelian philosophy. In fine, the aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to provide an (exegetical) account of Hegel's absolute Idea à la Žižek's newly minted dialectical materialism, and (2) to thereby put forward a "neo-Hegelian" reading of Kierkegaard's concept of essential knowing; a reading, I hope, that will pair nicely Kierkegaard's concept of essential knowing with Hegel's absolute Idea—insofar as the very subjectivity that Kierkegaard claims to be lacking in the Hegelian system is nonetheless central to it.