Žižek is Wrong (Again)
Reality is not Incomplete, it is Hyper-complete
With modern quantum physics, the great metaphysical split between philosophy and natural science is almost undeniably appearing to come full circle. In a reverse-event, the questions that separated physics from critical and transcendental philosophy seem to be the very questions that are today uniting them: can an object be defined in isolation? Is the position of the observer inscribed in the substantial world itself? Can the material world form a coherent, unified totality? These are the problems of physics today, and yet they have also been the problems of philosophy for around 200 years.
In 1991, Deleuze and Guattari saw an ally in physics when confronted with ‘the last question that the philosopher ever asks themselves’: What is Philosophy? Yet their use of physics was to extract models of chaos, of continuously varying virtual objects, and of an infinite multiplicity of abstracted intensities, which might point philosophy in a new direction. In other words, for Deleuze & Guattari, natural science did little more than provide certain possible horizons, new models of thought, which philosophy could appropriate and develop. This is radically different to what the development of quantum physics implies for the history (not the future) of philosophy. This latter problem, of reinterpreting the history of philosophy according to contemporary epistemes, is if anything where Slavoj Žižek sees his role: it is not about what physics means for philosophy, but of what philosophy means for physics. Unfortunately, however, Žižek’s method of reading modern science into philosophy - specifically, into Hegel and occasionally into Lacan - goes astray almost immediately.
Since the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit, it seemed Hegel at once needed rescuing. No sooner was the foundation of dialectical idealism laid, than Hegel began being misinterpreted as some mystical obscurantist or simple evolutionary philosopher of endless antitheses and syntheses. Several figures, including Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Alexandre Kojève, and the anti-Hegelian avatars of French Theory, seemed to have contributed to a perpetual misreading of the rigorous processes of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic. With Badiou, Žižek, Jameson (and the Ljubljana School more generally), however, Hegel was re-situated as an anti-teleological thinker of ontological paradoxes par excellence.
Of all three, Žižek’s reading of Hegel - the same reading which allows him to recognise Hegel’s greatest accomplices as Lacan and quantum mechanics - is the most straightforward: reality is ontologically incomplete. Yet it is exactly this conclusion which seems to betray Hegel, Lacan, and quantum physics. These ontological systems are not incomplete, they are what I would call hyper-complete: they are structured by conceptual systems that are in a perpetual overestimation, or non-identity, with themselves, and from this they produce indeterminate excesses that are entirely superordinate to the very planes on which they operate. In other words, if Hegel and quantum physics stand for anything, it is not incompleteness, but (as I will argue) the complex position of an indeterminacy that presupposes a determined, yet self-contradictory, totality.
Hyper-completeness, not Incompleteness
As I mentioned in Part 1 of my disagreements with Žižek, in Less Than Nothing, an otherwise impressive and monumental piece of theory, Žižek’s uniting theme across Hegel, Lacan, and quantum mechanics is that epistemological insufficiency is in fact ontological incompleteness. In other words, our inability to effectively and totally know an objective reality - no matter what experimental apparatus we use - reveals an incompleteness located in reality itself. But is a systematic, ontological ‘incompleteness’ really the red thread from Hegel to quantum physics? This conclusion seems to not only depart from all three, but to miss the more interesting conclusion: that Hegel, Lacan, and quantum mechanics furnish a far more perplexing hyper-completeness of reality. Their totalising, logical functions contradict themselves and furnish qualitatively irreducible contradictions. This abruptness to Žižek’s positions is also what forces him to prematurely dismiss figures such as Jung, Heidegger, or Nietzsche, who I generally would defend alongside Lacan and Hegel.
For Jung (as I am arguing in an upcoming essay for Psychoanalytic Dialogues), the collective unconscious and its archetypes are superordinate abstractions derived by the contingent, everyday structure of consciousness. The mythological archetypes are the ‘exceptions’ produced by the finite imperfections of consciousness that consciousness itself is unable to account for. The archetypal position is not what is left incomplete in human consciousness, but what is all too human, and even hyper-human, in human consciousness. For Nietzsche, similarly, the all-too-human is not a subordinate incompleteness, but a topographically higher mode of human drive. The will to power, for example, is a dizzying departure from nature, rather than a remnant of humanity’s natural ground. It expresses a human impulse that humanity itself fails to coherently assimilate. Madness is, for Nietzsche, therefore more rational than sanity itself.
We see a similar avowal with Lacan, where the same superordinate position can be ascribed to the Real. The Real is not a simple remainder of the process of symbolisation, an abnormal x that forever fails to find its place in the Symbolic (which is how Žižek describes it in The Sublime Object of Ideology). This view of the Real implies that the Symbolic is a consistent totality - yet if Lacan insists on anything, it is that the Symbolic, or language, is irreconcilable with itself. It produces enigmas and contradictions that are only possible because language is already there, and inevitably fails to account for its own consequences. Hence why language indefinitely displaces its own implications in the register of the (always absent) big Other.
The Real is for Lacan a distortion of the Symbolic that is produced by the Symbolic itself. Much like rules can’t be broken if the game itself is thrown away, if the Symbolic is taken away, so is the Real. To put it in a slightly awkward way, the Real is more Symbolic than the Symbolic itself, since it is the culmination of the inconsistent logic of the Symbolic that this logic cannot in turn assimilate. The important point is that the Symbolic is not incomplete, and the Real does not reflect this incompleteness. The efficiency of the Symbolic is rather in excess of its own comprehension. It produces certain infinite complexities which it cannot in turn account for, and it is here where the Real emerges. The Real is therefore the symptom of the hyper-completeness of an unstable Symbolic structure - it is a testimony to the fact that there is far more to be said about the Symbolic than about whatever preceded the Symbolic, and far more to know about the Symbolic than the Symbolic can know of itself.
With Hegel (who Žižek inevitably comes to rely on even more than Lacan), the notion of ‘incompleteness’ is just as inadequate. The Badiou-Jameson-Žižek reading of Hegel as anti-teleological is of course true: Hegel does not suggest that there is some imminent point which Spirit tends towards in which everything is known and predicted. Absolute knowledge is instead an avowal of the radical openness, the infinite formal possibilities, which are constructed by a conceptual knowledge that presupposes only itself. What is nevertheless most striking about Hegel’s system is not the incompleteness that leaves any determinacy open, but the indeterminacy that is furnished by determinacy itself.
There is a straightforward view of the ontological development of Hegel’s Science of Logic: from indeterminacy, to determinate being or existence, to essence, and finally to the concept. But this entirely misses the retroaction of the concept upon its own ground. Indeterminacy is not a prerequisite to determinacy, but a function of determinacy - it is the indeterminate core of any determined being which allows it to be framed as its own opposite. This is why Hegel is able to insists that his Doctrine of Being can begin either with Being or with Nothing: the negation of being is a feature of being itself. Being presupposes the very thing which it fails to account for - it exists only by incorporating the discrepancy that is furnishes as irreducible to itself. In another perspective, nothing negates itself in order to produce a being that is other than itself, infinitely presupposing nothing as the mode in which existence can be expressed. It is not incompleteness, then, but a conceptual indeterminacy, which drives Hegel’s Logic towards the Concept. That which escapes the Concept is not its incompleteness, but the indeterminate excess that the Concept is itself responsible for.
The famous Hegelian line that substance appears as subject, and in so doing reconstructs substance as presupposing its own (subjective) disparity towards itself, does not mean - as Žižek seems to imply - that substance, or ontological reality, is merely incomplete. It means rather that it has an indeterminate affinity to the very thing it cannot account for: the subjective position as inscribed within the a-subjective. The very important shift from incompleteness to indeterminacy is also one that is at home in quantum physics. Insisting on a type of a priori incompleteness in the subatomic structure of the world misses what Leonard Susskind suggests is a kind of production of indeterminacy in quantum states. Whether we argue that the function of consciousness is entirely incalculable, or whether we argue that observation internally determines the observed thing, the crux of quantum entanglement is indeterminacy. For example, the method of aligning a measurement apparatus with possible values of a degree of freedom such as quantum spin (i.e. independent of spatial coordinates), will have the very odd effect of influencing the values given off by this spin. There is, of course, something there to be measured - but in order to be there, it has to produce an indeterminacy regarding its own probabilities.
My insistence on indeterminacy over incompleteness may seem trivial, but I would argue that it is a crucial distinction. Incompleteness implies that whatever problem there is with reality, it is subordinate, a simple failed programming. Indeterminacy, however, is based on the fact that reality is too complete for its own good, that it is all too real. Just like the Lacanian Real is not simply what was left out of the process of symbolisation, but a disorienting, self-contradictory augmentation of the paradoxical effects of the Symbolic, Hegel’s ontology - like Nietzsche’s will to power, Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, or Jung’s collective unconscious - all depart from a superordinate, all too real indeterminacy: a hyper-completeness which leaves the ‘world’ (in Badiou’s sense) fundamentally irreconcilable to itself. Hegelian ontology is not simply an incomplete contingency that inevitably assimilates its own incompleteness. It is a system which realises itself by departing from itself, by furnishing the very indeterminacy that can be articulated only at a self-reflective distance. Žižek mistakenly insists on incompleteness, the far less interesting counterpart to the paradoxical function of indeterminacy - and it is this which leads Žižek towards an understanding of God which misses the very abnormality about God that God misses about Himself.
God as a Middle-Management Bureaucrat
In good Schellingian spirit, Žižek comes to rely on a reformatting of God in order to elaborate his ontological position. Unlike Schelling, however, who uses God as an impersonal embodiment of the rationality of the Naturphilosophie, Žižek’s use of God to explain what he calls ‘ontological incompleteness’ is brief: God is a lazy programmer. He simply could not be bothered to constitute an absolutely complete reality, and the ‘holes’ in reality which remains to be patched up are finally being revealed with the help of quantum physics.
But if it is not incompleteness that God left lying around in the world, but rather an unnameable, hyper-complete indeterminacy, then I would suggest that God is not so much lazy as he is reckless. To be reckless does, after all, take more energy than to be lazy, and the superordinate discrepancies of the world can only be accounted for by an irresponsible overinvestment rather than a lazy underinvestment.
This unregulated excess of activity is in fact the defining feature of Schelling’s God, and it is this feature which Žižek’s lazy God misses. Schelling’s God constitutes Himself by an auto-generative capacity to negate His own infinite negative contraction into nothingness. God posits Himself as the very origin from which He emerges as a systematic feature of reality. In other words, and as Die Weltalter argues, God posits Himself as preceding His own existence, as the possibility of His own past. God is thereby forced to insert a disparity, a retroactive void, between Himself and His own emergence. This is where the famous line of the extra-divine in the divine itself comes from. What is most central to God is the very thing which cannot be subsumed by God. Schelling’s rational God is therefore in excess of Himself: not incomplete, but more God than God. Žižek’s reading of God as lazy is therefore misguided.
God is not simply a lazy programmer - he’s an irresponsible automaton. In other words, if God is anything, He is the type of late capitalist managerial figure who confidently represents an economic process that He cannot himself understand or account for. The reality furnished by God is a reality that produces an endless series of antagonisms - He is the signpost of a system (like decentred post-Fordist capitalism) so automated that it becomes unable to catch up with its own consequences. God’s political economy is, in other words, not incomplete, but hyper-complete: it’s totality reaches beyond itself into a purely virtual discrepancy. Žižek’s suggestion that reality is incomplete - and its theological, Hegelian, Lacanian, and physical correlates - misses what is most evident about these systems, and about reality itself. There is no a priori gap that always remains to be filled, but rather a higher-order discrepancy, a productive consequence that cannot be re-assimilated. Reality is, in other words, far too real for reality itself to make sense of.
Absolutely brilliant. Even though I appreciate Žižek, nothing sparks interest more than a good critique.
It seems to me that most who have put in the effort to read Hegel and not just the Phenomenology or the earlier essays will understand that Hegel was vying for both completeness and certainty. Zizek's reading of Hegel is strange, to say the least, and we also have letters to show that Hegel's teleology was an effort to show that human existence and suffering were in fact for something rather than nothing; he admitted this much.