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Žižek on Hegel on Identity

April 8, 2011 by Daniel Horne 18 Comments

One public intellectual who has made much hay of Hegel's continued relevance is Slavoj Žižek, who begins one of his jazz-session-like lectures on Hegel’s concept of identity here:

Watch on youtube.

It’s not clear to me whether Žižek is properly interpreting Hegel, mostly because I find both Žižek and early Hegel incomprehensible. Z's been accused of mis-reading Hegel, and of being a self-contradicting crypto-anti-semitic charlatan to boot. (Which is a bomb I can't drop without immediately providing Z's own self-defense.)

Maybe Žižek's a fraud; maybe he just angers the intellectually insipid. I think vehement criticism is the inevitable price you pay when you don't try to make yourself understood. But I'll reserve judgement, as I haven’t read the necessary syllabus to decipher him. But I’ll give him this: he’s more disarming and affable than I expected, and his lectures are more fun (sometimes in a NSFW way) than most.

-Daniel Horne

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Filed Under: Things to Watch Tagged With: G.W.F. Hegel, Jacques Lacan, philosophy podcast, Slavoj Zizek

Comments

  1. Mark Linsenmayer says

    April 8, 2011 at 9:42 am

    This’ll be a little more on point to our 2nd discussion (to go up by Monday, hopefully!).

    Reply
  2. Tom McDonald says

    April 8, 2011 at 12:09 pm

    In this particular piece I think Žižek is doing an uncontroversial interpretation of Hegel’s treatment of the development of the determinate thought of identity, A=A, out of perceptual experience and its struggles in the Phenomenology.

    In perception philosophy deals with the problem of unity and multiplicity or substance and properties: the thing of perception seems to be both one and many; the table is both “table” and also its whiteness, woodenness, squareness, etc.

    I think what Žižek wants to emphasize here is that the proposition of identity, that the table is table, that A=A, is not a natural or necessary or given phenomenon, it is a determination of reflective thought. He says there is an arbitrariness or contingency in this determination.

    The point is that all the determinations of thought are in some sense reflective or self-determinations in the time it takes to make such determinations about the world.

    The phenomenological argument or description here is supposed to show that the old dualistic problem, between the determined thing or substance and its various appearances, can be resolved when thinking grasps its own synthetic and pragmatic character.

    It’s critical to note that in Hegel’s Phenomenology this dialectic of perception and identity takes place before consciousness explicitly encounters how an opposing desire (another consciousness) can contest, negate, and limit its own perceptual determinations, forcing it to become more explicitly self-conscious about these determinations it makes.

    That’s why Žižek talks about conflict, but when he talks about this he ventures into his Lacanian psychoanalytic territory of which I’m skeptical. For example, he make the normative claim that we shouldn’t romanticize the thought of the unborn child in the womb as a simple natural phenomenon. This is an interesting dialectical move. He wants to force us not to naturalize our own thought-determinations or beliefs. Hegel’s concept of spirit requires that we be aware of the contingency of the way in which we make sense of the world and recognize it as ours. He want us to avoid ‘naturalizing’ our own normative beliefs.

    Reply
    • Daniel Horne says

      April 8, 2011 at 12:15 pm

      Nicely done, Tom!

      Reply
      • Tom McDonald says

        April 8, 2011 at 12:21 pm

        Thanks Daniel : )

        Reply
  3. Tom McDonald says

    April 8, 2011 at 1:08 pm

    BTW for anyone who didn’t get that far there is a charming discussion of the codification of porno faces in the next video in the series. At the very least we have to hand it to Ž for making philosophy entertaining.

    Reply
  4. Daniel says

    April 8, 2011 at 6:36 pm

    he seems a bit wiry… plus the way he keeps wiping his nose it makes me wonder if he is lecturing with a lot of cocaine in his system…

    Reply
    • Seth Paskin says

      April 9, 2011 at 2:36 pm

      Dude, totally!

      Reply
      • Tom McDonald says

        April 9, 2011 at 7:14 pm

        He is definitely on something. Sartre used amphetamines to amp up his writing output. The inference from Žižek’s constant nose wiping and sniffling to cocaine use strikes me as the best explanation ; )

        Reply
        • stable says

          July 16, 2011 at 3:33 pm

          With Zizek’s “intellectual rock star” never-ending global speaking tour, the man would be dead at this point if it were coke.
          It might be some sort of speed. I bet it is just psychosomatic. He’s very anxious.

          Reply
          • Devin McNulty says

            August 13, 2014 at 2:16 pm

            Well, he repeatedly says he’s never taken any drugs or alcohol in his life, due to his “Stalinist paranoia”… Maybe he get’s his energy and jouissance from actually breaking the bonds of reason and understanding Hegel’s concept of spirit!

    • Daniel Horne says

      April 10, 2011 at 3:52 pm

      This appears to be a pretty common observation!
      http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/10/today-interview-capitalism

      17. A person who attended to one of your lecturers said that, ‘I believe that Zizek has taken Cocaine’. It’s a comment about your hyper animated presence. Have you ever taken cocaine or any other similar drug?

      Zizek: Many people believe that-even some of my friends. But surprisingly never in my life did I take drugs-not even soft drugs. Its not that I am a moralist or anything. Many people around me take drugs. May be it’s my disciplinarily-terrorist attitude. May be if you take drugs, then you get soft, then the enemy can attack you easily I hate drugs.

      Reply
  5. Douglas Lain says

    April 9, 2011 at 1:31 am

    I want to thank you for your Hegel episode and point out that as I’ve read and listened to Zizek his interpretation of Hegel through Lacan (or is it Lacan through Hegel) has seemed less and less outrageous.
    I thought I’d also point you in the direction of a blog entry of my own. I’d be curious to know if anyone can make heads or tails out of my contention that Zizek misses the central contradiction or split in Capitalism…or if anyone cares to try to make heads or tails out of it.
    http://douglaslain.net/?p=611

    Reply
    • Tom McDonald says

      April 9, 2011 at 7:44 pm

      Thanks for this Doug.

      I will read your blog post and comment further on it there.

      I think Žižek’s most serious book, the one shorter on jokes and longer on his fundamental argument for an advance in philosophy via insights from psychoanalysis, is The Parallax View. He is indeed a very insightful reader of everyone from Kant to Lacan in this book:

      http://www.amazon.com/Parallax-View-Short-Circuits/dp/0262512688/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1302394824&sr=8-3

      Politically, I think it’s fruitful to read Rorty and Žižek as giving two sorts of Left Hegelian options, in contrast to a contemporary Right Hegelian position like Fukuyama’s. Where Žižek remains an Activist, Rorty in his “liberal ironism” concludes that philosophy may have to accept a Stoic Quietism regarding its relationship to the liberal state, which may be the best we can hope for. One reason for this is precisely what you identify as Žižek’s “Statist Fetish”. Where else should he turn when the postmodernist liberal left are so feeble on realpolitik? The Left is at an astounding philosophical and practical impasse. Just consider the lack of any major economic voice on the global financial collapse from the radical Left. I appreciate how often Žižek tries to remind his audience of this. It shows intellectual honesty.

      Reply
    • Tom McDonald says

      April 9, 2011 at 9:04 pm

      I’m gonna post my reply to Doug’s theory about the contradiction in capitalism here as well as on Doug’s blog.

      Doug: I might personally agree with your proposition that “our society is not one characterized by [direct] democratic political institutions, but rather real direct democracy is visible only in the market. However, [the negation and contradiction of this freedom is in] production.”

      However, my agreement with you about this would seem to be based on our sharing a certain Desire for democratic freedom manifest in more than merely the marketplace, where we can see even the democratic freedom of consumer choice being negated or contradicted by our own being forced to produce the cycle itself.

      Question: Even if democratic freedom is contradicted here, should we expect that this contradiction has motive force to create desire in people for radical change?

      My pessimistic worry is that there are not enough people who desire recognition and self-realization as free individuals over and above undemocratic material satisfaction of wants.

      Here’s another way to sate the problem:

      Your emphasis on the desire for freedom is too Hegelian and idealistic and not really Marxist and materialistic.

      It is perhaps ironic that if we follow Marx’s more rigorous materialism, the proposition that material satisfaction is the only true motive force in political history, then we have to grant that the people may accept unfreedom so long as they are materially satiated.

      On the other hand, if we follow Hegel’s more ‘idealistic’ proposition about the desire for recognition as motive force, then we may not have enough individuals seeking democratically expressed freedom to make a case for mass political effects.

      Reply
  6. Douglas Lain says

    April 10, 2011 at 12:36 pm

    Here’s my reply to Tom from my blog reprinted here.

    Tom: The way I look at it both material deprivation and material abundance can support the status quo. In times of great stress and deprivation the workers look out for themselves, try to survive in the system as it is rather than having the energy to launch an attack for something more. In times of plenty the masses feel satisfied and have no urgency or cause to resist.
    So crisis or abundance are neither one enough to cause mass action. And yet, strangely, both can spur mass action. The sixties were affluent times. The Egyptian revolt was spurred on by deprivation.
    It seems to me that the freedom promised by Capitalism, not the material abundance but the unmet desire, is what will spark revolution.
    In Egypt I heard people shouting, “I’m Egyptian! I’m Egyptian!” It was as if the promise of Egypt was being realized through the overturning of Egypt. I imagine that a revolution in the US would produce masses who shouted, “I’m American! I’m American!” And What would be really nifty would be if these masses shouted the words in Arabic, or Swahili, or French.
    —
    It might interest you to know that I interviewed Adrian Johnston, the author of Zizek’s Ontology, a few months back. Here’s the link:
    http://dietsoap.podomatic.com/entry/2010-10-14T00_49_13-07_00

    Reply
  7. Christina Dell says

    July 13, 2011 at 10:10 am

    Hegelian triad involves the internalization of nothingness or difference. Consequently, Žižek’s account of identity in Hegel rebuts Lacan’s objection that Hegel promotes a self-identical subject of self-consciousness.

    Reply
    • Daniel Horne says

      July 13, 2011 at 12:41 pm

      That’s the best summary I’ve read yet, thanks!

      Reply
  8. stable says

    July 16, 2011 at 3:47 pm

    Zizke is a fun speaker but I have a difficult time following him even when I can understand what point he’s trying to make.
    Something worth a look is the “RSA Animate” -on YouTube- for a Zizek talk. Freakin’ brilliant. As Zizek frantically conveys his take on capitalist elitist philanthropy and how charity is wicked a brilliant animator’s hand is shown speedily doodling, making Zizek’s words into pictures. It totally works and is awesome and I never understood Zizek more clearly. One of RSA’s more highly rated and viewed pieces..
    Dig it.

    Reply

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