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Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics Of Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Metaphysics Idealism Žižek and the Paradoxical Ontological Catastrophe: Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism Joseph Carew This book is an original investigation into Slavoj Žižek’s return to German Idealism in the wake of Lacanian psychoanalysis. As is well known, Žižek creates productive friction between these traditions by isolating their mutually compatible notions of the J death drive, paving the way for Žižek’s highly oseph Carew original model of the subject. Joseph Carew systematizes the stark metaphysical conse- quences of Žižek’s account. If the emergence of the Symbolic out of the Real marks the advent of a completely self-enclosed struc- tural system, then we must posit the absolute as a fragile not-all wrought by negativity and antagonism. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Cover design by Katherine Gillieson · Illustration by Tammy Lu Ontological Catastrophe New Metaphysics Series Editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphys- ics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic- continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intel- lectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical ‘sound’ from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main inter- est is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Joseph Carew Ontological Catastrophe OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS An imprint of MPublishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, 2014 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2014 Freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.12763629.0001.001 Copyright © 2014 Joseph Carew This is an open access book, licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 Design by Katherine Gillieson Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu The cover illustration is copyright Tammy Lu 2014, used under a Creative Commons By Attribution license (CC-BY). ISBN-13 978-1-60785-308-4 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books published under the OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS imprint at MPublishing are produced through a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org Contents Acknowledgements 9 Introduction 11 1. The Madness of the Symbolic 19 2. Grasping the Vanishing Mediator Between the Real and the Ideal 37 3. Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Transcendental Subjectivity 53 4. The Problem of Nature in the Lacanian Subject 67 5. Kant, Todestrieb, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle 85 6. From Transcendental Philosophy to Substance as Subject 108 7. The Logic of Transcendental Materialism 140 8. When the World Opens its Eyes 171 9. The Abyss of Unconscious Decision 193 10. Radicalizing the Subject 223 11. From Radical Idealism to Critical Metaphysics 259 12. The Deadlocks of Ontological Catastrophe 283 Bibliography 317 To the Memory of Joey Basha Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to two people without whom this project would not have been possible: Dr. Antoinette Stafford and Dr. Sean McGrath. Dr. Stafford is, in many ways, the reason why I am doing philosophy, and it is to her that I owe my knowledge of the history of modern philosophy and German Idealism, without which this book would never have gotten off the ground. Dr. McGrath sparked my interest in psychoanalysis and has been a constant source of inspiration for my reading of Schelling. I must thank him for stressing the notion of the ambiguity of the Real in Lacan and Žižek, which immensely shaped my own engagement with these authors, and for all the encouragement he has given me since. Secondly, I should thank four people who read the manuscript at various stages of its production. Dr. Peter Trnka and the late Dr. James Bradley read a very early version of the manuscript several years ago, and I am much indebted to their extremely kind and useful commentary. While Dr. Bradley gave me insight into further aspects of Žižek's philosophy—some of which has shown up in my other work on Žižek—and encouraged me to continue the project, Dr. Trnka's much appreciated criticism helped me avoid conceptual imprecision at several key points, as well as general difficulties in the presentation of psychoanalytical methodology. Specifically, Dr. Trnka's emphasis on the conflictual relation between materialism and idealism in many ways moulded my own views on the difficult Symbolic-Real relation in 10 Acknowledgements Žižek's transcendental materialism into the form they take here. Dr. Graham Harman's comments and suggestions were of great help in stylistically improving the manuscript's quality, in increasing its overall coherence, and also in avoiding several pitfalls of argumentation. I should also thank him for his always quick responses to various questions I had while preparing the manuscript. Last but certainly not least, I thank Kyla Bruff for her laborious proofreading of the final two drafts. Her careful eye was able to eliminate innumerable ambiguities and awkward turns of phrase, thus making the book much smoother. Thirdly, I would like to express my gratitude to the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada and Europhilosophie for their generous funding, which both directly and indirectly supported the project. I would also like to thank the Memorial University of Newfoundland's Department of Philosophy and School of Graduate Studies for additional financing in the form of fellowships and awards, which enabled me to begin the first draft. An early version of three strands of argumentation that appear in what follows has been published as “The Grundlogik of German Idealism: The Ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling Relation in Slavoj Žižek,” International Journal of Žižek Studies, 5, no.1 (2011); “'Why is There Nothing Rather Than Something?' Less Than Nothing's New Metaphysics,” International Journal of Žižek Studies, 8. no.1 (2014); and “Denaturalizing Nature, Dehumanizing Humanity: Lacan, Žižek, and the Metaphysics of Psychoanalysis,” in Natürlichkeit und Künstlichkeit zwischen Tatsache und Ideal, ed. Benedetta Bisol (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014). Introduction A Metaphysical Archaeology of the Psychoanalytico-Cartesian Subject This book is an investigation into Slavoj Žižek's return to German Idealism in the wake of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Its thematic crux is Žižek's attempt to develop, by reading the traditions against one another by means of their mutually compatible notions of Todestrieb, a highly original theory of subjectivity able to explain the subject's simultaneous freedom from and dependence upon its material ground. But it does not stop there: rather than just limiting itself to a recapitulation of Žižek's account of the eruptive, ontologically devastating birth of subjectivity out of nature, it also seeks to systematize the stark metaphysical consequences of this account. The fundamental thesis of this book is that, if the emergence of the Symbolic out of the Real—the passage from nature to culture enacted by the founding gesture of subjectivity—is the advent of a completely self-enclosed, self- sustaining structural system, then not only must its founding gesture withdraw from the scene in the very act of instituting the Symbolic, but further, even to explain this act we must posit the absolute as a fragile not-all wrought by negativity and antagonism. Or, to put it in terms of Žižek's Less Than Nothing (his latest magnum opus, or “big fat Hegel book,” as he says), as a series of less than nothings whose essence constitutes an ontologically incomplete field. By means of a metaphysical archaeology of the psychoanalytico- Cartesian subject, an archaeology that is the necessary supplement to 12 Introduction Freud's own archaeological investigations of the emergence of mind out of the conflict of unconscious drives and their vicissitudes,1 especially in the aftermath of Lacan's structuralist reworkings of it, what we will see is that Žižek's own ontology of the subject goes far beyond the normal constraints of psychoanalytical methodology (which is so concerned with psychogenesis and its various pathologies) and radically challenges our normal conception of self and world, a challenge
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