Everything Wrong with Žižek

A Slovenian End to Ontology and Politics (part 1)

The most unsettling problem with being in the history of ontology is that it cannot account for itself. Being represents the very thing which it rejects, and is grasped only insofar as it is misplaced and misidentified. In a similar way, the issue with Žižek is unusually similar to the issue of being itself: Žižek seems unable to account for his own implication. Whatever Žižek’s intervention in the history of philosophy is intended to imply, it is an intervention which is infinitely divorced from itself. It would be disingenuous to argue that Žižek contributed nothing to philosophy. He has not produced any great systems, nor has can his project be characterised as a type of ‘critique’, in the Kantian sense, whereby a critique furnishes the possibility for a new frame for the transcendental subject. He does not set any great new coordinates for philosophical inquiry, but the originality of Žižek’s work is instead the fact of rejecting either of these alternatives.

Zizek’s principal innovation occurs in the form of repetition: repetition is not mere insistence, a simple compulsion, for Žižek, it is rather the act through which a thing comes to define itself. The obvious objection to this perspective is that Žižek was not the originator of this method. Marx’s historical materialism had already argued that the the meaning of a thing is only evident once it had repeated itself. In order to constitute the determinate implication of a single instance, it needs to have occurred twice. Similarly, Laplanche had argued in the 80s that the fundamental insight of psychoanalysis is that a subjectively defining event occurs only by repeating itself. Whatever happens must, by the contingency of its internal logic, occur twice in order to retroactively justify the spectral appearance of its first instance.

So what differs in Žižek’s understanding of repetition? For Žižek, repetition is not merely the case of vindicating (in a second occurrence) whatever was latent in the first occurrence, but rather of constructing what was never present in the first place, to construct the thing that was definitively ‘missing from itself’ in its first occurrence. To repeat, for Žižek, is not merely to confirm or constitute something, but rather to alienate it from itself. By being repeated, something reveals to itself the very idea that it initially and necessarily excluded. Repeating Hegel (and repeating him as a defence of Marx’s legacy), as Žižek claims is his life’s project, is therefore to reveal in Hegel the very thing which was missing from Hegel. To repeat an idea is, for Žižek, to disjunctively reconcile it to itself by showing that it was never in fact the idea it believed itself to be.

Žižek thereby intends to show that the identity of a thing to itself occurs only insofar as it differs from itself, yet that the moment separating identity and difference is a moment of repetition. Here, however, we stumble upon the first problem with Žižek’s thought: this form of repetition existed long before Žižek’s appearance. What Žižek revives is not the logic of repetition itself, but a formally Derridean task of framing any identity as a specific moment of difference. If it is true that the repetition of something simply installs within it the very thing that it initially rejected from itself, then the Žižekian insistence is to suggest that something totally foreign to an idea can be ascribed to this idea only insofar as we repeat it. Unlike his post-structural predecessors, Žižek differs only insofar as he picks a privileged figure to subject to this repetition: Hegel. To repeat Hegel is to construct the absent originality that was latent in the old Hegel - to find in the identity of the past Hegel the moment whereby he differs from himself, the moment where Hegel’s identity can no longer account for itself, and thus re-emerges as a totally new figure in the history of philosophy.

Žižek’s specific historiography of philosophy had undoubtable benefits: his reading of Hegel, alongside for example the Ljubljana School, Alain Badiou, and Todd McGowan, discerned a rigorously argued alternative to the classical view of Hegel’s dialectics as an endless overcoming of contradiction, as a simple process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. And yet something about his method falls flat. The perspective on Hegel gained by Žižek is obscured by his incomplete formulation of the consequences of this method, and by his faulty approach to the related themes - including Events, Lacan, or politics - of his reading of Hegel.

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The Event that Rejects Itself

As mentioned, it was not the creation of a system, but rather a selective, and often highly effective, deployment of various (often opposed) strands of philosophy which inevitably defined Žižek’s position. Except for Hegel and Lacan, however, one of Žižek’s great accomplices was (and continues to be, despite their supposed disagreements) Alain Badiou. And yet it is on the topic of his reliance and simultaneous divergence from Badiou that Žižek’s incomplete position slowly begins to reveal itself.

Both Badiou and Žižek have positioned themselves as thinkers of ‘Events’, of radically destabilising occurrences which introduce an irreconcilable disparity into the world as it is. Badiou’s Event, however, is furnished by a mathematical formulation of ontological multiplicities that ‘reach beyond themselves’ (that are organised by an uncountable axiom of infinity), and thus refuse to be contained by any preconceived logical structure. On the other hand, Žižek’s Event falls victim to the self-referential openness of the Lacanian Symbolic in which an Event would emerge, and thus cannot frame the type of ontological contradiction from which a true Event is possible. Žižek’s Event, as I argue, is constitutively closed off to itself.

For Badiou, the Event is a trace of an ontological multiple (an inconsistent infinity) which is always in excess of the situation in which it emerges. In the case of love, for example, the love-Event cannot be reduced to the everyday relations which preceded it: whatever the disorienting experience of love is, the only subjective certainty is that it is constitutively unlike any personal priorities (career, self-preservation, hobbies etc.) that we were familiar before falling in love. Whilst similar to Žižek’s understanding of love, Badiou makes a fundamental distinction: Love is not an empty gap, a purely negative discontinuity. It is rather grounded in an ontological multiplicity, a reality more real than the logical, everyday structures against which it is opposed.

Žižek does not base his theory of the subject or his ontology in formally infinite mathematical sets. Instead, he uses a strictly Lacanian frame: the subject is the supplement of its own impossibility. The subject is, in other words, a spectral implication within an impersonal system of language, and thus is only incompletely related to itself as the product of an internally dysfunctional linguistic system. Love would therefore signify nothing more than the ‘openness’ of the Symbolic, the possibility of an existential discrepancy within the world as it is, and in turn the subject’s irreconcilable non-identity to itself. Žižek’s ontology is nothing other than its own absence, the being of Love is merely the obfuscation of being produced by language.

Unlike Badiou, Žižek’s view of an Event can never truly be called an Event (despite Žižek having written an entire book on the subject), since it lacks the inherently formal excesses, the destabilising multiplicity, of an ontological ground which constitutes the truly oppositional, and thus disorienting, quality of an Event. Badiou’s fundamental insistence is that, by its mathematico-ontological ground, the Event retroactively justifies itself from the new logical series that it creates. The Event inscribes its position as logically necessary by appeal to an ontological tension which logic (i.e. language, the Symbolic) by itself does not initially account for. It is precisely this form of a rigorous ontology of self-justification that Žižek’s Event lacks, since whatever Event he describes is the supplement to an auto-conditioned irregularity not between the Symbolic and ontology, but between the Symbolic and itself. This is, more precisely, why Žižek’s Event cannot truly be labelled an Event.

There is, of course, no inherent need to side with Badiou over Žižek, nor is there a need to defend Badiou’s ‘mathematical ontology’, in which a definitive ontological ground is formulated according to the axioms of infinite sets. There may, indeed, be no such self-articulating ontological ground. Schelling, Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida all insist that, in one way or another, ontology is coloured by a disconcerting impossibility. ‘The history of ontology (or the history of being) is at the same time the exclusion and elision of being.’ There is no being as such which can be spoken of, even if it is only spoken of negatively. There is no ontological formation that expresses itself in clear opposition to everyday life. There is instead a contradiction in the very coordinates of our methods of understanding, expression, or articulation - a contradiction (or even a gap) which is at the same time covered up by these very methods of understanding. Behind these everyday modes of knowledge, we see only their entanglement with our very capacity to question them. Being would in this case not be neatly opposed to the everyday, but an enigma that is always-even misplaced by the understanding we approach it with. Whatever being there may be, it seems to constitutively reject itself.

The problem, however, is that Žižek is not faithful to the implications of this auto-referential, logical-linguistic discrepancy of a Symbolic pseudo-Event. It may be true that the subject is nothing more than the remedy to its own non-existence, but the questions which Žižek entertains (the revolutionary possibility of love, art, politics, and science; the experience of Events; a defence of Hegel’s ontology) are the same questions that are most at home with Badiou, and which require a manipulable difference between an ontological ground and its distorted, subjective expression. This is not to say that Žižek’s philosophy is confused, nor that it is ‘experimental’, but rather that it misrecognises its own intention. In one and the same move, Žižek both defends and rejects ontology, he speaks of Events where there are only continuities, and even more enigmatically defends the Hegelian method only by abandoning the (Hegelian) ontological ground (reworked but nevertheless retained by Badiou in the form of the Concept) upon which a subjective experience would be possible.

The Political Ontology of Objects

With this, we return (or repeat) the issue of Žižek’s historiography of philosophy. Žižek seems to fall prey to the same disparity which he locates in the philosophies he repeats: he is mostly unaware of his own implication. Žižek’s repetition does not merely alienate from a philosopher their relation to themselves, but rather serves as a method of self-justification, and as a perpetuation of the very problems of philosophy that Žižek attempts to bypass.

That any philosophy of repetition immediately short-circuits itself, reveals itself as impossible, can be seen where Deleuze and Žižek (who places himself in the opposite camp to Deleuze) are opposed. Deleuze’s philosophy of repetition was, if nothing else, an attack on Hegel, on dialectical categories, and on psychoanalytic structuralism. Difference-in-itself - the metaphysical insistence that difference precedes identity - is for Deleuze the term which marks his absolute rupture with the forms of identity-philosophy which Žižek so strongly defends. Yet by an uncanny reversal, Žižek’s return to the philosophy that Deleuze rejected inevitably reproduces the very discrepancy that Deleuze himself articulated.

Less Than Nothing is Žižek’s greatest statement on the necessity of these classical figures of a so-called philosophy of identity: by ‘repeating Marx through Hegel, and Hegel, through Lacan’, a vision of an anti-teleological Hegel who avows the primacy of contradiction and the self-discrepancy between being and itself emerges. The ultimate statement is for Žižek that epistemology is merely a special case of ontology, that knowing is an effect of being, or more specifically that “epistemological insufficiency is ontological incompleteness”. In other words, our inability to know a thing down to its purest detail, the insufficiency of our attempts at getting a complete picture of a thing, is not simply due to a problem in our methods of observation, but rather reflects the lack of sufficient detail in the being of the thing itself. Our lack of complete knowledge reflects the gap, the imperfection, in ontological structures themselves, the problematic or irregular status of the object’s internal being. Being is incomplete, and this ontological discrepancy will only ever produce our imperfect modes of knowing it.

But this formula, the great conclusion of having repeated Hegel in modern times, is suspiciously similar to Deleuze’s description of ‘problematic being’. For Deleuze, the ‘difference-in-itself’, i.e. the a priori formal difference with which ontology begins, has an inevitably subjective, even scientific, implication. As he writes in Difference and Repetition, the moment of our subjective questioning is distributed between the subject and the object: the “being of the object is that of a question”, it is ontologically incomplete. This ‘problematic being’ of the object itself is reflected in our miscomprehension of it. Thus when we fail to ‘truly’ grasp an object, or to completely resolve a question, it is because this discrepancy, this questioning, is internal to the object itself. The object ad its being are internally open-ended, they exist in the form of an unanswerable question.

Žižek’s problem is therefore that he ironically reproduces the philosophy of his greatest philosophical enemy. This is not simply the case with Deleuze’s relatively early work, but with his later embrace of an experimental, perpetually re-structuring description of rhizomes in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where the emphasis on a de-centred becoming of infinite modes of desiring-production and variations on partial, deterritorialised expressions find a certain mirror in Žižek’s insistence on the interminably paradoxical and dynamically self-reversing logic of modern ideology.

It would of course be absurd to suggest that Deleuze and Žižek have identical (or even bridgeable) philosophical positions. The truth is more unpleasant than this: they are not identical, because they cannot even be opposed to each other. There is an inherent asymmetry between the two, between Deleuze’s perspective and Žižek’s anti-perspective. Žižek’s position is radically malleable, it does not constitute one of two (or multiple) poles of opposition, but rather an internal indeterminacy which lends him to any possible reading, to any possible pole.

It is true, as most Hegelian scholars are coming to realise, that Hegel indeed avows a certain internal contradiction to being itself, its self-negating formula. It is therefore likely that it is Deleuze who is most clearly mistaken on the topic of Hegel (which is fathomable considering that he barely cites Hegel, and that his knowledge of Hegelian philosophy would be plagued by the excessive oversimplification of Kojève’s version of Hegel). Yet Žižek does not acknowledge this discrepancy, but rather remains duped as the the meaning of his own reading of Hegel, or to the fact that Žižek’s Hegel could be nearly anyone else’s philosophy (suggested by his endless tendency to performatively agree with his opponents, even the most reactionary ones, in debates). This is undoubtedly one of the greatest problems with Žižek: he seems to misunderstand the very essence of the repetition he deploys, or more precisely to deprive this deployment of any essential internal logic.

The answer to resolving the impasse of contemporary philosophy is, for Žižek, to repeat it, to re-found Hegel and thereby furnish a new version of Hegel which serves modern times. But this method seems to only re-frame the impasse of philosophy, to reproduce it only in a new light. My answer, regarding what is to be done with philosophy, tends towards disappointment, towards an I don’t know. But this is an I don’t know, a radical disappointment with current possibilities, which should be tactically deployed. Disappointment, as I have argued elsewhere, has an ontological force - it should be embraced as a critical function, instead of merely attempting to construct new histories of philosophy with the optimistic hope that a new direction will be found. This is the disappointment of an I don’t know that Žižek never dared to utter. It is the unknowing which recognises that even repetition itself has already been repeated.

Ontological Politics of the End Times

Žižek perhaps necessarily insists that, more than ever, now is the time not to act, but to think (‘Don’t do, just think!’): when the End of Times is so rapidly approaching, acting quickly can sometimes only enhance the disaster. And yet Žižek does not recognise the irony of his discourse on the End: that this End is itself capitalised, it is permeated with an ideological weight, and furnished as an internal reference point to the global capitalist system which is propelling us towards this very End, and which can continue not despite this End, but as a consequence of this very End.

The function of the Doomsday clock reveals this very paradox: each year, ‘experts’ from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board gather to decide on how far from ‘midnight’, or the End, we currently are. And yet any frame or understanding of this End of our capitalist world is nevertheless dictated by those international experts which global capitalist structures erected to serve its interests. Nobody seems to realise the irony of an international organisation of experts, gathering on a structured yearly schedule to discuss the speculative possibility of the absolute end of any form of civil organisation or structure. On several occasions, the doomsday clock has been moved back from midnight, not because we have managed to ‘avert crisis’, but because it a temporarily bad investment to manufacture worry about an ‘End’ which can be made profitable. Whatever this end is that we so easily speak of, it is an End not external to, but internally thinkable by, today’s global market, and despite his efforts, Žižek seems to inevitably speak of this virtual-Symbolic End that only obscures the real meaning of an Ending.

The true End, the End of all previous monetised, ideological Ends, is the one which would break with any notion of experts, any notion of a Doomsday clock. Capitalism fetishises its own limits: it conceals its problem precisely by revealing it, by obscuring the Real with the Real itself. Žižek is rightly sceptical of any thinking which posits possible alternatives, for fear of ‘alternatives’ merely being a thin veil of ideological distortion, and yet he cannot consider the consequences of an ‘End of Times’, of an end of any alternatives, that would nevertheless act as its own ideological distortion. Once again, Žižek is incapable of confronting the ideological distortion that inadvertently colours his own critique of ideology.

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