For me, the core of the text lies exactly where the ontological question shifts. Reality is not missing something, but rather it is larger than any description we can give of it. What appears as incompleteness is not a lack in being, but the subjective experience of a reality that contradicts itself, is overdetermined, and presupposes more than it can ever fully integrate.
I think of the sea – but not of swimming in it, rather of traveling by boat. The boat is important: it stands for orientation, technique, decision, course. You are not at the mercy of the elements; you have instruments, maps, experience. You can choose where you go. This is thinking.
So you move through the sea, and for a long time everything functions as it should. The sea is there: buoyant, calculable enough to allow navigation. It carries the boat. It permits direction.
And then you reach a point where something shifts. Not because the sea suddenly disappears. Not because your instruments fail. But because you encounter a boundary of consistency.
The sea is there – and simultaneously not there.
Not in the sense of an illusion, but in the sense of an objective self-contradiction: it continues to carry you, but it can no longer be unambiguously determined as "what it is." It is surface and depth, carrier and abyss, medium and interruption all at once. None of these determinations is wrong, but none suffices. The sea contradicts itself not temporally, but simultaneously.
And precisely here arises the registration that is too hastily called "incompleteness." But what you register is not a hole in the sea. It is a point at which the sea presupposes more than it can itself stably maintain. Your boat does not sail to the edge of the world, but to a point where the world no longer cleanly adheres to its own coordinates.
The crucial point: this experience is not merely subjective. You are not hallucinating an abyss. You encounter a real structure in which being itself does not coincide with itself. Your sense that "something is wrong here" is the epistemological signature of an ontological tension.
In this sense, the idea of hypercompleteness convinces me where it understands incompleteness as an epistemological registration – as an impression that emerges when a reality is more than my perspective can bear, but also: more than it itself can be. It becomes less convincing for me where this idea itself wants to become a stable ontological coin again.
I would therefore not say that incompleteness and hypercompleteness are two sides of the same coin. Rather, incompleteness is the imprint that a contradictory reality leaves in a limited position – a reality that does not suffice for itself because it cannot be grasped as a unified, self-contained whole.
This is not a lack that needs to be fixed, but a simple condition of life: to travel by boat on a sea that is there and not there at once. You can continue sailing. Not because the contradiction disappears. But because life – and thinking – happen precisely where the sea carries without having to be coherent.
Thank you very much for your text; it is very illuminating and helps me greatly to visualize a potential Zizek-Deleuze-Laruelle debate (Zizek, in his works from the 90s and 2000s, provides the foundations, but since he establishes his own coordinates, I sometimes find myself lacking other perspectives).
And I wonder: would you say your position is that of Deleuze, but not the Deleuze of «A Thousand Plateaus» or «Anti-Oedipus», but rather that of «The Logic of Sense»? The Deleuze of «The Logic of Sense» develops a technique that already appears in «Difference and Repetition»: an instrumental and heuristic dialectic—not a dialectic of reason, or a constitutive use of reason in Kantian terms, but a dialectic like that found in the work of Sacher-Masoch (according to how Deleuze understands Dialectics in his preface to «Coldness and Cruelty»).
I am also thinking of how, in «The Logic of Sense», he understands contradiction and speaks of the plurality of senses that clash and coexist in the way you express, separating lack from overdetermination. Is it how Deleuze articulates the problem of depth, the organ, and the real, alongside surface effects and conceptual overdetermination, revolving around the figure of an empty signifier? Your post reminds me very much of the dialectical structure—yet compatible with modern mathematics and modern brain analysis (variable areas)—of the Question-Answer method
Intriguing response! “Hypercompleteness” seems to be a kind of purely spatial representation of ‘infinity’. In this way, I think logical language does not suffice to understand even meta-reality. For that, perhaps Wittgensteinian cues are more relevant: metaphor as a means to leave purely linguistic efforts behind is the path to understanding. So regarding the axis of this debate between you and Zizek, perhaps it could be renovated with richer philosophical tools than abstract language alone.
Wittgenstein could be an interesting addition, although I don’t think I agree that his work deals with articulating the inarticulable in a similar way to Hegel’s concept (which posits it’s presuppositions as other-than-itself). Infinity in the form of irrational infinite sets in excess of themselves have an affinity here, but in a parallel way. I could definitely add more here though, but for now I wanted to meet Zizek on his own terrain of Lacan-Hegel-quantum physics (adding in Jung and Nietzsche of course).
Hi Rafael, you say “it is simply a failure of the subject to truly mirror the hypercompleteness of the world itself”. The entire argument is intriguing and fascinating and ingenious but I am not sure that there is anything that can be called “the world itself” – metaphysically: how can there be? I mean, again, metaphysically? Compare a tourist’s world or place with a historian’s. Is the difference just the subject’s “subjective” sense of difference? Or is it better understood rather as a different world for each in the inclusion that each determines in “it” of the different sorts of things “there”?
If you mean the existing real world “in itself” as a metaphysical entity what is that? I can talk about the real existing fried egg I have just cooked, but I know what I mean. But in regard to the metaphysics of the “existing real world” the idea of that would seem, as an idea, never “complete”, e.g. stymied by the tourist/historian dichotomy even if they are sitting next to each other on a coach. It would seem to need to be primary to our thinking when we are talking about it, again – once again – when we are talking about the existence of the real world as a metaphysical object – that the case is surely that we have NO idea what we are talking about: isn't that the point? Metaphysically? That there isn’t such a thing in these terms as “All the world”. The whole world. In any case, language has got pretty frictionless at this stage. "Back to the rough ground!" (to quote Wittgenstein).
As you mention in your essay, physics and philosophy are finding interests in common on more and more issues in regard to what we are to say as to the being of things, of the world, of the cosmos.
Physicists are coming up against the incorrigibility of the metaphysical, themselves, with questions of if time doesn’t exist and so on so they find too this “problem” of the being of what fundamentally probably isn't solvable – in words – as to what the world is – since what is that? – since this question along with its answer keeps changing with each perspective (and I don’t mean each different mode of subjectivity: I mean each different context: which does not mean the same thing as to any instance of a subjectivity): so to repeat in all this there is no talking of the world in itself. That dialogue can’t even begin. Even if mathematical models can do a reasonable job of keeping "it" all in a single box, even if they can do that job – supposing scientists to have reached this stage – that is only in the job of imagining reality as a non-perspectival entity – in general – and merely because mathematics is of that perspective to start with: is an abstract ideal. I.e.: is empty of all real content. I.e. is a perspective without perspective. As in a model that has no edges; a figure that has no shape.
So we are not looking at a really existing world – “the world itself” as you put it – in any sense of a metaphysical image or perspective of what it is either as hypercomplete or incomplete, in so far as we are not doing this in any way that does not simply refer back to itself as to a kind of nothing. As in “This is simply what I do.” (See: Philosophical Investigations, 217) In a sense, if you want it to be hypercomplete, good for you, so be it. But so nothing. And the same for the incomplete argument. What this argument, as you are casting it, appears to be reproducing – in reality therefore – is just another specialised philosophical language game, is just the age-old question of the one and the many, but with a Lacanian etc spin. Is reality one thing or is it many things? Where to this varied question one wants to reply: why go there? What for? (But so too can there be good reasons to go there.)
.... Reverting to Wittgenstein again – and possibly, indirectly to Heidegger, who couldn't stand any debate about this, not in respect of the being of being: he wanted to strike off the possibility of the being of the subjective versus the being of the objective as a debatable topic – it was nonsense to him – since as an idea our Beyng presumably is in some sense real of itself and exists as the matter of its very logic – which is inaccrochable and so as such is of itself nothing to do with those terms – and so alluding therefore too to Heidegger but without leaving a mark – but reverting to Wittgenstein again, in Wittgenstein … reality is not a thing. There are no things, no things to speak of, that are tenable as philosophical ideals, there are not even things like sides to coins – not that can be idealised philosophically. There is no Left v Right. Black v White. There is only the language game.
There is no heads versus tails as the ideal for the outcome of any sort of metaphysical understanding we might want to come to, in what Wittgenstein characterises as the “subliming” of our language. We can investigate being, we can investigate say the sudden appearance of a mouse that has turned up – since it seems to have appeared inexplicably, to have come from nowhere: a mouse whose being has no origin, apparently, but again it is doubtful that any <thing> will come of it as to the concept of its reality. Certainly not as to any decision about the thing we call reality – if in any case “reality” is a language game. You can drop a brick on someone’s head but not a language game. So there goes your reality of the “mouse” that investigation has determined beyond all reasonable doubt has come from nowhere. No one will believe you.
So you can do that, physically intervene, but where it remains that even as both the language game and the brick are real, neither is the same sort of “thing”. Since in the ordinary sense, a language game is not a thing. So the upshot of this is that – in the ordinary sense – metaphysically reality doesn’t exist. Reality doesn’t exist. It doesn’t “exist”. Again, metaphysically reality doesn’t exist to start with. For sure, it exists as real – reality exists – but only so to speak anecdotally – just as the number “1” exists – but where it exists only in anecdote – since, metaphysically, it disappears: as Frege discovered, it disappears into paradoxical sets.
The anecdotal nature of the proof of the number “1” outraged Frege, he thought it a scandal, but there it was. Like Wittgenstein’s mouse there are sets that include those sets that are not included in sets.
So once again, and to repeat, like the number “1” too, reality doesn’t exist either. In reality there is no “the world itself”. Outrageous as that may seem. You are addressing nothing more, logically, than an anecdote (about a “mouse”). There is nothing “real” in reality. Metaphysically. You wont find reality in “reality”. Just as metaphysically, once again, no such things as numbers are that are actually “there” are there – there are none. Just as – as existing – there is no such thing as infinity.
But I hope Zizek pays attention to your thesis. Good luck with it and best wishes.
For me, the core of the text lies exactly where the ontological question shifts. Reality is not missing something, but rather it is larger than any description we can give of it. What appears as incompleteness is not a lack in being, but the subjective experience of a reality that contradicts itself, is overdetermined, and presupposes more than it can ever fully integrate.
I think of the sea – but not of swimming in it, rather of traveling by boat. The boat is important: it stands for orientation, technique, decision, course. You are not at the mercy of the elements; you have instruments, maps, experience. You can choose where you go. This is thinking.
So you move through the sea, and for a long time everything functions as it should. The sea is there: buoyant, calculable enough to allow navigation. It carries the boat. It permits direction.
And then you reach a point where something shifts. Not because the sea suddenly disappears. Not because your instruments fail. But because you encounter a boundary of consistency.
The sea is there – and simultaneously not there.
Not in the sense of an illusion, but in the sense of an objective self-contradiction: it continues to carry you, but it can no longer be unambiguously determined as "what it is." It is surface and depth, carrier and abyss, medium and interruption all at once. None of these determinations is wrong, but none suffices. The sea contradicts itself not temporally, but simultaneously.
And precisely here arises the registration that is too hastily called "incompleteness." But what you register is not a hole in the sea. It is a point at which the sea presupposes more than it can itself stably maintain. Your boat does not sail to the edge of the world, but to a point where the world no longer cleanly adheres to its own coordinates.
The crucial point: this experience is not merely subjective. You are not hallucinating an abyss. You encounter a real structure in which being itself does not coincide with itself. Your sense that "something is wrong here" is the epistemological signature of an ontological tension.
In this sense, the idea of hypercompleteness convinces me where it understands incompleteness as an epistemological registration – as an impression that emerges when a reality is more than my perspective can bear, but also: more than it itself can be. It becomes less convincing for me where this idea itself wants to become a stable ontological coin again.
I would therefore not say that incompleteness and hypercompleteness are two sides of the same coin. Rather, incompleteness is the imprint that a contradictory reality leaves in a limited position – a reality that does not suffice for itself because it cannot be grasped as a unified, self-contained whole.
This is not a lack that needs to be fixed, but a simple condition of life: to travel by boat on a sea that is there and not there at once. You can continue sailing. Not because the contradiction disappears. But because life – and thinking – happen precisely where the sea carries without having to be coherent.
Thank you very much for your text; it is very illuminating and helps me greatly to visualize a potential Zizek-Deleuze-Laruelle debate (Zizek, in his works from the 90s and 2000s, provides the foundations, but since he establishes his own coordinates, I sometimes find myself lacking other perspectives).
And I wonder: would you say your position is that of Deleuze, but not the Deleuze of «A Thousand Plateaus» or «Anti-Oedipus», but rather that of «The Logic of Sense»? The Deleuze of «The Logic of Sense» develops a technique that already appears in «Difference and Repetition»: an instrumental and heuristic dialectic—not a dialectic of reason, or a constitutive use of reason in Kantian terms, but a dialectic like that found in the work of Sacher-Masoch (according to how Deleuze understands Dialectics in his preface to «Coldness and Cruelty»).
I am also thinking of how, in «The Logic of Sense», he understands contradiction and speaks of the plurality of senses that clash and coexist in the way you express, separating lack from overdetermination. Is it how Deleuze articulates the problem of depth, the organ, and the real, alongside surface effects and conceptual overdetermination, revolving around the figure of an empty signifier? Your post reminds me very much of the dialectical structure—yet compatible with modern mathematics and modern brain analysis (variable areas)—of the Question-Answer method
Intriguing response! “Hypercompleteness” seems to be a kind of purely spatial representation of ‘infinity’. In this way, I think logical language does not suffice to understand even meta-reality. For that, perhaps Wittgensteinian cues are more relevant: metaphor as a means to leave purely linguistic efforts behind is the path to understanding. So regarding the axis of this debate between you and Zizek, perhaps it could be renovated with richer philosophical tools than abstract language alone.
Wittgenstein could be an interesting addition, although I don’t think I agree that his work deals with articulating the inarticulable in a similar way to Hegel’s concept (which posits it’s presuppositions as other-than-itself). Infinity in the form of irrational infinite sets in excess of themselves have an affinity here, but in a parallel way. I could definitely add more here though, but for now I wanted to meet Zizek on his own terrain of Lacan-Hegel-quantum physics (adding in Jung and Nietzsche of course).
Hi Rafael, you say “it is simply a failure of the subject to truly mirror the hypercompleteness of the world itself”. The entire argument is intriguing and fascinating and ingenious but I am not sure that there is anything that can be called “the world itself” – metaphysically: how can there be? I mean, again, metaphysically? Compare a tourist’s world or place with a historian’s. Is the difference just the subject’s “subjective” sense of difference? Or is it better understood rather as a different world for each in the inclusion that each determines in “it” of the different sorts of things “there”?
If you mean the existing real world “in itself” as a metaphysical entity what is that? I can talk about the real existing fried egg I have just cooked, but I know what I mean. But in regard to the metaphysics of the “existing real world” the idea of that would seem, as an idea, never “complete”, e.g. stymied by the tourist/historian dichotomy even if they are sitting next to each other on a coach. It would seem to need to be primary to our thinking when we are talking about it, again – once again – when we are talking about the existence of the real world as a metaphysical object – that the case is surely that we have NO idea what we are talking about: isn't that the point? Metaphysically? That there isn’t such a thing in these terms as “All the world”. The whole world. In any case, language has got pretty frictionless at this stage. "Back to the rough ground!" (to quote Wittgenstein).
As you mention in your essay, physics and philosophy are finding interests in common on more and more issues in regard to what we are to say as to the being of things, of the world, of the cosmos.
Physicists are coming up against the incorrigibility of the metaphysical, themselves, with questions of if time doesn’t exist and so on so they find too this “problem” of the being of what fundamentally probably isn't solvable – in words – as to what the world is – since what is that? – since this question along with its answer keeps changing with each perspective (and I don’t mean each different mode of subjectivity: I mean each different context: which does not mean the same thing as to any instance of a subjectivity): so to repeat in all this there is no talking of the world in itself. That dialogue can’t even begin. Even if mathematical models can do a reasonable job of keeping "it" all in a single box, even if they can do that job – supposing scientists to have reached this stage – that is only in the job of imagining reality as a non-perspectival entity – in general – and merely because mathematics is of that perspective to start with: is an abstract ideal. I.e.: is empty of all real content. I.e. is a perspective without perspective. As in a model that has no edges; a figure that has no shape.
So we are not looking at a really existing world – “the world itself” as you put it – in any sense of a metaphysical image or perspective of what it is either as hypercomplete or incomplete, in so far as we are not doing this in any way that does not simply refer back to itself as to a kind of nothing. As in “This is simply what I do.” (See: Philosophical Investigations, 217) In a sense, if you want it to be hypercomplete, good for you, so be it. But so nothing. And the same for the incomplete argument. What this argument, as you are casting it, appears to be reproducing – in reality therefore – is just another specialised philosophical language game, is just the age-old question of the one and the many, but with a Lacanian etc spin. Is reality one thing or is it many things? Where to this varied question one wants to reply: why go there? What for? (But so too can there be good reasons to go there.)
.... Reverting to Wittgenstein again – and possibly, indirectly to Heidegger, who couldn't stand any debate about this, not in respect of the being of being: he wanted to strike off the possibility of the being of the subjective versus the being of the objective as a debatable topic – it was nonsense to him – since as an idea our Beyng presumably is in some sense real of itself and exists as the matter of its very logic – which is inaccrochable and so as such is of itself nothing to do with those terms – and so alluding therefore too to Heidegger but without leaving a mark – but reverting to Wittgenstein again, in Wittgenstein … reality is not a thing. There are no things, no things to speak of, that are tenable as philosophical ideals, there are not even things like sides to coins – not that can be idealised philosophically. There is no Left v Right. Black v White. There is only the language game.
There is no heads versus tails as the ideal for the outcome of any sort of metaphysical understanding we might want to come to, in what Wittgenstein characterises as the “subliming” of our language. We can investigate being, we can investigate say the sudden appearance of a mouse that has turned up – since it seems to have appeared inexplicably, to have come from nowhere: a mouse whose being has no origin, apparently, but again it is doubtful that any <thing> will come of it as to the concept of its reality. Certainly not as to any decision about the thing we call reality – if in any case “reality” is a language game. You can drop a brick on someone’s head but not a language game. So there goes your reality of the “mouse” that investigation has determined beyond all reasonable doubt has come from nowhere. No one will believe you.
So you can do that, physically intervene, but where it remains that even as both the language game and the brick are real, neither is the same sort of “thing”. Since in the ordinary sense, a language game is not a thing. So the upshot of this is that – in the ordinary sense – metaphysically reality doesn’t exist. Reality doesn’t exist. It doesn’t “exist”. Again, metaphysically reality doesn’t exist to start with. For sure, it exists as real – reality exists – but only so to speak anecdotally – just as the number “1” exists – but where it exists only in anecdote – since, metaphysically, it disappears: as Frege discovered, it disappears into paradoxical sets.
The anecdotal nature of the proof of the number “1” outraged Frege, he thought it a scandal, but there it was. Like Wittgenstein’s mouse there are sets that include those sets that are not included in sets.
So once again, and to repeat, like the number “1” too, reality doesn’t exist either. In reality there is no “the world itself”. Outrageous as that may seem. You are addressing nothing more, logically, than an anecdote (about a “mouse”). There is nothing “real” in reality. Metaphysically. You wont find reality in “reality”. Just as metaphysically, once again, no such things as numbers are that are actually “there” are there – there are none. Just as – as existing – there is no such thing as infinity.
But I hope Zizek pays attention to your thesis. Good luck with it and best wishes.