The Parallax View is a major work of theoretical philosophy by Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. The book represents one of his most systematic attempts to articulate a comprehensive philosophical position, drawing together Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist political theory into a unified framework centered on the concept of “parallax”—the apparent displacement of an object caused by a change in observational position.
The work is structured as a dense, multi-layered philosophical treatise that moves across numerous domains: epistemology, ontology, theology, political economy, cultural criticism, and psychoanalysis. It engages extensively with the history of philosophy, particularly Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, while also incorporating contemporary thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and Ernesto Laclau. Throughout, Žižek deploys an eclectic range of cultural references—from Hollywood films and Marx Brothers jokes to Henry James novels and avant-garde art—to illustrate and advance his theoretical arguments.
The book’s title signals its central methodological commitment: the parallax gap, understood as the irreducible difference between two perspectives on the same phenomenon that cannot be dialectically mediated or synthesized into a higher unity. This concept serves as Žižek’s key to reinterpreting dialectical materialism for contemporary philosophy.
The text is written in Žižek’s characteristic style: argumentative, digressive, and punctuated by provocative examples and asides. It combines rigorous philosophical analysis with polemical interventions into contemporary debates in critical theory, cultural studies, and political philosophy. The book operates simultaneously as a work of systematic philosophy, a polemic against rival theoretical positions, and a demonstration of the continuing relevance of Hegelian-Marxist thought.
Context
The book emerges from a specific moment in the history of critical theory and continental philosophy. It responds to the perceived crisis of Marxism following the sociopolitical defeats of the late twentieth century and the decline of dialectical materialism as a viable philosophical position. Žižek positions his work against both the “mechanical materialism” of orthodox Marxism and the “idealist obscurantism” of contemporary theory.
The intellectual landscape the book addresses includes several competing tendencies. French “pure politics” theory—represented by Badiou, Rancière, and Balibar—had sought to separate political philosophy from economic analysis, a move Žižek criticizes as a degradation of economy to an “ontic” sphere. Anglo-Saxon Cultural Studies had similarly abandoned the critique of political economy. Against these trends, Žižek insists on the continued relevance of Marx’s critique of political economy as a “socio-transcendental a priori.”
The book also engages with the legacy of German Idealism, particularly the relationship between Kant and Hegel. Žižek’s wager is that the parallax gap—the antinomy that Kant identified and that Hegel supposedly mediated—actually provides the key to understanding dialectics’ subversive core. This involves a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism against both its Stalinist ossification and its poststructuralist dismissal.
The work responds to developments in the sciences as well, particularly cognitive neuroscience (Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One), quantum physics, and biogenetics. Žižek addresses the philosophical implications of these scientific developments, criticizing both the “radical naturalism” of thinkers like the Churchlands and the New Age spiritualism that claims science compels abandoning materialism.
The book is also situated within debates about the legacy of psychoanalysis, particularly the Lacanian school. Žižek draws extensively on Lacan’s later seminars, especially the concepts of the sinthome, the drive, and the formulas of sexuation, using them to reformulate questions of subjectivity, ethics, and politics.
Structure of the Book
The book is organized into chapters that move from the most abstract philosophical questions to concrete political and cultural analyses. The opening chapter, “The Subject, This ‘Inwardly Circumcised Jew,'” establishes the book’s central problematic: the nature of the subject and its relationship to the parallax gap. It begins with the Introduction’s discussion of dialectical materialism and the two 2003 media stories that illustrate the “impossible short circuit of levels,” then proceeds through detailed analyses of the Kantian transcendental subject, negative versus indefinite judgment, and the “inhuman” core of subjectivity.
The second chapter, “Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology,” develops the theological dimensions of the parallax view. It examines Lacan’s theory of primordial repression and the binary signifier, the relationship between Law and transgression, and the ethical implications of Kantian autonomy. The chapter includes extended discussions of Kierkegaard, the Hölderlin paradigm, and the concept of sacrifice, culminating in analyses of Claudel’s The Hostage and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady.
The third chapter, “The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit,” continues the theological and ethical investigations while introducing questions of comedy, appearance, and the critique of fetishism. It contains the analysis of Hegel’s dialectic of appearance and essence, the discussion of comedy and universality, and the famous Paris graffiti joke. The chapter also includes an extended interlude on Henry James, examining his stylistic procedures and their philosophical implications.
The fourth chapter, “The Loop of Freedom,” addresses questions of freedom, determinism, and the relationship between the phenomenal and noumenal realms. It includes discussions of Kant’s practical philosophy, the paradox of noumenal freedom, and the relationship between Kant and Sade.
The fifth chapter, “From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Power,” shifts to political economy and the analysis of capitalism. It examines Marx’s critique of political economy, the relationship between economy and politics, and the concept of surplus-value. The chapter includes critical discussions of Kojin Karatani’s work and the relationship between money and capital.
The sixth chapter, “The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie It,” addresses questions of ideology, fantasy, and the possibilities of political emancipation. It examines commodity fetishism, the nature of ideological belief, and the relationship between knowledge and acknowledgment.
Main Arguments
The central argument of the book concerns the nature and significance of the parallax gap. Žižek argues that the parallax gap—the irreducible difference between two perspectives on the same phenomenon—provides the key to understanding the subversive core of dialectics. Against the common reading that Hegel dialectically mediates all oppositions into higher syntheses, Žižek contends that the parallax gap is never fully mediated; it persists as an irreducible tension that constitutes the very structure of reality and subjectivity.
The book argues for a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism, understood not as the Stalinist “diamat” that Žižek dismisses as “imbecility incarnate,” but as a philosophical position that takes seriously the gap between humanity and its “inhuman” excess. Dialectical materialism, in Žižek’s formulation, introduces the death drive and the “inhuman” core of the human—the gap between humanity and its excess. This involves a displacement of the traditional distinction between dialectical and historical materialism: rather than treating them as universal versus special ontology, Žižek displaces the difference into the particular itself.
A related argument concerns the nature of the subject. Žižek argues that the transcendental subject is neither noumenal nor phenomenal but a purely formal function—empty, with no phenomenal intuition corresponding to it. The subject is free only insofar as the noumenal domain remains inaccessible; direct access to the noumenal would reduce us to “mere mechanisms” or “thinking machines.” This leads to the paradoxical conclusion that at both phenomenal and noumenal levels, humans are mechanisms, free only in the space between.
The book argues for a specific understanding of the relationship between economy and politics. Against both the “pure politics” of Badiou and Rancière and the Cultural Studies degradation of economy, Žižek insists on the irreducibility of the economic to the political and vice versa. The economy-politics relationship is itself a parallax: one sees either the logic of commodities or the logic of political antagonism, never both simultaneously. This is not a mere epistemological limitation but concerns Marx’s “real abstraction”—abstraction inscribed into actuality itself.
Žižek argues for a materialist theology, developing the “building blocks” for understanding the relationship between God, man, and the Absolute. He suggests that a radical materialist approach should opt for the position that “man exists because God is not fully himself”—the “primordial fact” is the noncoincidence of the Absolute with itself, the inner split of the primordial Void. This involves a reinterpretation of Christian theology, particularly the Incarnation and the Crucifixion, in terms of the parallax gap.
The book argues against the “philosophy of finitude” associated with Heidegger, which Žižek criticizes as utterly serious and lacking humor. What the emphasis on finitude misses is the objet petit a as the “undead” remainder persisting in obscene immortality. The Freudian paradox is that what explodes the constraints of finitude is the death drive itself.
Key Concepts
Parallax: The central concept of the book, borrowed from optics, referring to the apparent displacement of an object caused by a change in observational position. Žižek extends this to describe the irreducible gap between two perspectives on the same phenomenon—a gap that cannot be dialectically mediated. The parallax gap appears in various modes: quantum wave-particle duality, the ontological difference, the Real (which has no positive consistency but is just the gap between perspectives), desire versus drive, and the unconscious.
Dialectical materialism: Žižek’s rehabilitation of this term, distinguished from both Stalinist “diamat” and the more acceptable “materialist dialectic.” Dialectical materialism approaches the question of how, from within positive being, the gap between thought and being emerges. It introduces the death drive and the “inhuman” core of the human.
The “inhuman”: The terrifying excess inherent to being-human, distinguished from the merely non-human. The “inhuman” is neither human nor inhuman but marked by an excess that is the very core of subjectivity. This connects to the Kantian revolution: with Kant, the excess to be fought becomes immanent—the very core of subjectivity itself.
Negative versus indefinite judgment: Kant’s distinction between denying a predicate (“the soul is not mortal”) and affirming a non-predicate (“the soul is non-mortal”). The indefinite judgment opens a third domain—the “undead,” neither alive nor dead but monstrous “living dead.” Similarly, “inhuman” is not the negation of human but a terrifying excess inherent to being-human.
The binary signifier: Lacan’s concept of what is “primordially repressed”—the signifier of the Woman, the secondary signifier that would complete the couple of Master-Signifiers. The symbolic order precludes the full harmonious presence of the couple S₁—S₂; the multiple emerges as attempts to fill the gap of the missing binary signifier.
The sinthome: Lacan’s later concept, the “undead” partial object that is the inscription on the body of “signifying stress”—the wound inflicted upon the body when colonized by the symbolic order. The sinthome is not a remainder of castration but literally the product of the cut of castration, the surplus generated by it.
Castration: Understood not only as the gap between element and empty space but also as correlative to an excessive element wandering without proper place—the “castrated” object that sticks out and floats around. Castration and its disavowal are two sides of the same coin; castration must be sustained by a noncastrated remainder.
The Real: Lacan’s concept, which Žižek reinterprets through the parallax view. The Real has no positive consistency; it is just the gap between perspectives. The thesis that the Real is the gap of inconsistency between two appearances must be supplemented by its opposite: appearance is the gap between two Reals.
Ontological difference: Heidegger’s concept, which Žižek reinterprets through Lacan’s formulas of sexuation. Ontological difference proper is feminine: reality is non-all, nothing beyond-outside it, and this Nothing is Being itself. Ontological difference is “minimal”—the bare minimum of difference between an entity and void—not “maximal” between all beings and something beyond.
The Master-Signifier: The reflexive signifier filling the lack of the signifier. Examples include Spinoza’s “God” (a pseudo-concept betraying ignorance of true causality), phlogiston, Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production,” and “postindustrial society.”
Surplus-value: Marx’s concept, which Žižek reinterprets against Karatani’s reduction of exploitation to price differences. Workers are not exploited by being underpaid—wages are in principle “just”; rather, labor-power’s use-value produces new value greater than its own, appropriated by capitalists.
Surplus-power: The political analogue of surplus-value, suggested by the book’s title for the fifth chapter, indicating the excess of power that emerges in political domination.
The “inwardly circumcised Jew”: Marx’s description of commodities, drawn from the Pauline definition of Christians who need no external circumcision since their true substance is money. The phrase signals the theological-economic nexus at the heart of the book.
The “Night of the World”: German Idealism’s metaphor for the core of subjectivity, contrasting with Enlightenment’s “Light of Reason.” Pre-Kantian madness meant deprivation of humanity; with Kant, madness implies unconstrained explosion of humanity’s core.
The “system of liberty”: The dialectical shift from liberation from the oppressive System to the “System of Liberty”—the recognition that freedom must be institutionalized, not merely negative.
Themes
The impossibility of direct encounter: A recurring theme is the structural impossibility of direct encounter between levels that are mutually untranslatable. The book opens with two 2003 media stories—the discovery that modern art was used in “psychotechnic” torture cells in Barcelona, and the claim that Walter Benjamin was killed by Stalin’s agents—both illustrating the “impossible short circuit of levels which, for structural reasons, can never meet.” The encounter between Leninist politics and modernist art cannot structurally occur; revolutionary politics and revolutionary art move in different temporalities. Similarly, the French Revolution and German Idealism were two sides of the same moment but couldn’t directly meet.
The dialectic of Law and transgression: The book develops the theme that Law itself solicits its own violation, generating the desire to “free oneself” by breaking it. Obedience to Law is never “natural” or spontaneous but always mediated by the repression of the desire to transgress. The more rigorously we obey, the more guilty we are, because obedience functions as a defense against sinful desire. This theme connects to the superego, the feeling of guilt, and the “Fall” as the renunciation of radical ethical autonomy.
The ethics of the unspoken: Through extended analyses of Henry James, the book explores the ethics of what is not said, of the secret that is maintained to preserve integrity. In The Golden Bowl, the crucial point is that it doesn’t matter if someone knows; what matters is that others do not know that they know. The “big Other”—the order of social appearances—should be kept in ignorance. This theme connects to the question of whether Maggie’s maneuvering is ethical, and whether the novel ends “in a great moral crash.”
The paradox of protection: The theme of the protector who is simultaneously the greatest threat appears in the analysis of The Golden Bowl: Adam, the ultimate agent of protection, is ready to do anything to protect his daughter’s innocence—yet he, the agent of their incestuous passion, is simultaneously the greatest threat to her innocence. The highest sacrifice falls to Adam: the most radical act of protection is for him to withdraw his protective shield and let his daughter go into the real world.
Comedy and the nullity of unveiling: The book develops a theory of comedy as the opposite of shame: shame maintains the veil, comedy unveils. The comic effect occurs when, after unveiling, we confront the nullity of the unveiled content—when after removing the mask we find exactly the same face as on the mask. This lack of difference confronts us with “pure” difference separating an element from itself.
The “feminine” ethics of sacrifice: Through analyses of Claudel’s The Hostage and James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the book explores the theme of sacrifice for nothing. Men sacrifice for a Thing; women sacrifice for nothing. Sygne de Coufontaine’s final “No” is a pure negation of the symbolic order; Isabel Archer’s decision to stay with Osmond is not feminine masochism but commitment to her word.
The critique of the philosophy of finitude: The book criticizes the Heideggerian emphasis on finitude as missing the “undead” remainder that persists in obscene immortality. Wagnerian heroes want to die to get rid of this obscene immortal supplement. The Freudian paradox is that what explodes the constraints of finitude is the death drive itself.
The materialist theology: The book develops the theme of a materialist theology, exploring the relationship between God, man, and the Absolute. The “primordial fact” is the noncoincidence of the Absolute with itself, the inner split of the primordial Void. This involves a reinterpretation of Christian theology in terms of the parallax gap.
The critique of state philosophy: The book criticizes the “neo-Kantian state philosophy” exemplified by Habermas, which tries to control biogenetics’ explosive results. This attitude betrays fear that something will actually happen, that a new dimension of the “human” will emerge.
The Author’s Conclusions
The book concludes with a series of interconnected positions that follow from the parallax view. Žižek argues that the parallax gap provides the key to understanding the subversive core of dialectics and is the first step in rehabilitating dialectical materialism. The gap between levels—between economy and politics, between the phenomenal and noumenal, between humanity and its inhuman excess—is not a limitation to be overcome but the very structure of reality and subjectivity.
The author concludes that the relationship between economy and politics is irreducibly parallactic: one sees either the logic of commodities or the logic of political antagonism, never both simultaneously. This is not a mere epistemological limitation but concerns Marx’s “real abstraction”—abstraction inscribed into actuality itself. The “pure politics” of Badiou, Rancière, and Balibar, which reduces economy to an “ontic” sphere, is as inadequate as the Cultural Studies degradation of economy.
Žižek concludes that the critique of fetishism must be supplemented by recognition of the performative dimension of “fetishist illusion”: the unity of the state actualizes itself only in the person of the king. The “fetishist illusion” has a performative dimension that cannot be dismissed as mere misperception. This reveals the insufficiency of Lefort’s democratic topos about the empty Place of Power: the charisma of Power is bestowed on the accidental individual following fetishist disavowal—”I know very well that this is an ordinary person just like me, but nonetheless…”
The author concludes that a radical materialist approach to theology should opt for the position that “man exists because God is not fully himself”—the “primordial fact” is the noncoincidence of the Absolute with itself, the inner split of the primordial Void. This involves a reinterpretation of Christian theology, particularly the Incarnation and the Crucifixion, in terms of the parallax gap. The “theological” dimension without which, for Benjamin, revolution cannot win, is the dimension of the excess of drive.
Žižek concludes that the task is “properly Christological”: changing the modality of being-stuck to allow sublimation. The analyst position is the only “autonomous” subjectivity, overlapping with “subjective destitution.” The analyst, like Christ, immediately is what they claim—but the analyst’s position differs from the Christological one in ways that the book’s final sections explore.
The book ends with the analysis of the “obscene knot of ideology” and the question of how to untie it. The final sections address the nature of ideological belief, the relationship between knowledge and acknowledgment, and the possibilities of political emancipation. The conclusion emphasizes that the parallax view is not a position of detached observation but a practical orientation that transforms the observer’s relationship to what is observed.
Significance
The Parallax View represents a major statement of Žižek’s philosophical project, synthesizing his engagements with Hegel, Lacan, and Marx into a systematic position. Its significance lies in several domains.
Within continental philosophy, the book offers a distinctive reinterpretation of the Hegelian legacy, arguing against both the “Kantian revenge over Hegel” and the postmodern dismissal of dialectics. Žižek’s claim that the parallax gap provides the key to dialectics’ subversive core positions his work against both Habermasian communication theory and Derridean deconstruction, offering a third path that insists on the continuing relevance of Hegelian-Marxist thought.
The book makes a significant contribution to the rehabilitation of dialectical materialism, rescuing the term from its Stalinist ossification while insisting on its difference from both mechanical materialism and idealist obscurantism. This involves a novel understanding of the relationship between dialectical and historical materialism, displacing the difference between them into the particular itself.
Within psychoanalytic theory, the book develops Lacanian concepts in new directions, particularly the sinthome, the drive, and the formulas of sexuation. The analysis of castration and its disavowal, the “undead” partial object, and the relationship between desire and drive offers new resources for Lacanian thought.
The book’s engagement with political economy, particularly its critique of Karatani and its insistence on the irreducibility of economy to politics, contributes to contemporary debates in Marxist theory. The claim that the economy-politics relationship is itself a parallax offers a way beyond both economic reductionism and the “pure politics” of contemporary French theory.
The extended analyses of Henry James—the “Interlude” on Kate’s choice and the discussion of The Golden Bowl—represent a significant contribution to the philosophical interpretation of literature. The reading of James’s “psychological nominalization” as desubstantializing the subject, and the analysis of the ethics of the unspoken, offer new perspectives on James’s late style and its philosophical implications.
The book’s treatment of theology, developing “building blocks for a materialist theology,” contributes to the growing field of political theology while insisting on a materialist framework. The reinterpretation of Christian theology in terms of the parallax gap offers a distinctive position in debates about religion and politics.
Finally, the book’s methodological significance lies in its demonstration of the parallax view as a mode of analysis applicable across domains—from quantum physics to cinema, from political economy to literature. The claim that bracketing produces its object, that “democracy” emerges only when bracketing economic relations and political state apparatus, offers a distinctive approach to the analysis of social and political phenomena. The book concludes by insisting that the parallax view is not a position of detached observation but a practical orientation that transforms the observer’s relationship to what is observed, opening new possibilities for both theoretical understanding and political practice.
Detailed Section-by-Section Summary
The Parallax Gap and the Two 2003 Stories
The book opens with two seemingly unrelated media stories from 2003. First, a Spanish art historian revealed that modernist art had been used as a deliberate instrument of torture: in 1938 Barcelona, the French anarchist Alphonse Laurencic designed “psychotechnic” cells inspired by Kandinsky, Klee, Buñuel, and Dalí. These cells combined geometric abstraction with surrealist patterns, angled beds, and strategically placed bricks to induce psychological breakdown, with green favored for producing melancholy. Second, a claim emerged that Walter Benjamin did not commit suicide in 1940 but was murdered by Stalin’s agents, who feared the manuscript he was carrying—his masterwork elaborating the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”—would be published. Both stories share a structural element: they create an “impossible short circuit” between levels that, for structural reasons, can never meet. This is analogous to Kant’s “transcendental illusion”—two phenomena graspable only in “parallax view,” existing on opposed sides of a Moebius strip with no shared space between them. The encounter between Leninist politics and modernist art, like that between the French Revolution and German Idealism, cannot structurally occur; they move in different temporalities, even when they emerge from the same historical moment.
Dialectical Materialism and the Parallax Wager
Žižek frames the parallax gap as “Kantian revenge over Hegel”—an antinomy that resists dialectical mediation. His wager is that this gap provides the key to dialectics’ subversive core and the first step in rehabilitating dialectical materialism. Today’s sciences practice materialist dialectic spontaneously, yet philosophically oscillate between mechanical materialism and idealist obscurantism. The crisis of Marxism stems from sociopolitical defeats and the decline of dialectical materialism itself. The crucial shift is from determinate reflection to reflective determination—from liberation from the oppressive System to the “System of Liberty.” Žižek condemns “revolutionary Beautiful Souls” who refuse to recognize the Cross of the postrevolutionary present. Stalinist dialectical materialism as “imbecility incarnate” is the point itself: Žižek conceives his Hegelian-Lacanian position’s identity with dialectical materialism as a Hegelian infinite judgment (“the Spirit is a bone”). The “Fourth Teacher” erred by ontologizing the difference between dialectical and historical materialism; instead, dialectical materialism introduces the death drive and the “inhuman” core of the human—the gap between humanity and its inhuman excess.
Thought, Being, and the Psychoanalytic Analogy
The Social is not on a different level from individual experience but something the individual relates to as minimally “reified.” The problem is how the external-impersonal socio-symbolic order must be structured for the subject to retain sanity. A private cynic presupposes naive others who “really believe.” The gap between individual and impersonal social dimension is inscribed back within the individual—the supreme example being Christ, where the difference between God and man is transposed into man himself. Historical materialism overcomes thought’s passive mirroring of reality through consciousness as an inherent moment of social being (Lukács: becoming-conscious transforms the working class into the proletariat). Dialectical materialism approaches from the opposite side: how, from within positive being, the gap between thought and being emerges. Fundamental categories aim at the “practical” aspect of thought’s passivity—how a living being breaks the cycle of life-reproduction through withdrawal into reflexive distance. The struggle of opposites was colonized by New Age polarity; Žižek replaces it with the One’s inherent tension, gap, and noncoincidence. Modes of parallax include quantum wave-particle duality, neurobiology, ontological difference, the Real, desire versus drive, the unconscious, and even the vagina—from sexual mystery object to maternity organ. Philosophy itself emerged in the interstices of communities, among those unable to identify with positive social identities.
The Transcendental Subject and Kantian Distinctions
The transcendental subject is a purely formal function that is neither noumenal nor phenomenal—empty, with no phenomenal intuition corresponding to it. The parallel between the void of the transcendental subject and the void of the transcendental object is misleading: the transcendental object is the void beyond phenomenal appearances, while the transcendental subject already appears as a void. Kant’s distinction between negative and indefinite judgment is crucial: “the soul is not mortal” versus “the soul is non-mortal.” This parallels Stephen King’s distinction between “he is not dead” and “he is un-dead”—the indefinite judgment opens a third domain undermining the underlying distinction, creating the monstrous “living dead.” Similarly, “he is not human” differs from “he is inhuman”: the latter means neither human nor inhuman but marked by a terrifying excess inherent to being-human. With Kant and German Idealism, the excess to be fought becomes immanent—the very core of subjectivity itself, hence the “Night of the World” metaphor for subjectivity’s core, contrasting with Enlightenment’s “Light of Reason.” In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Grete calls Gregor “ein Untier” (an inanimal)—an animal that while remaining animal is not really animal, showing the traumatic core of animality emerging only in a human become animal.
Freedom and the Noumenal Domain
The transcendental I’s “spontaneity” is the ultimate parallax—the third space between phenomena and noumenon. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason asks what would happen with access to the noumenal domain: God and eternity before our eyes would make actions done from fear or hope, none from duty; moral worth would not exist; conduct would become mere mechanism, “as in a puppet show.” Direct noumenal access would deprive us of spontaneity, turning us into lifeless automata. The inescapable conclusion: at both phenomenal and noumenal levels, humans are “mere mechanisms”—free only in the space between. We are free only insofar as the noumenal remains inaccessible. A truly free act for a noumenal entity would be knowing all horrible consequences of evil yet choosing it anyway—a truly “nonpathological” act. Kant’s formulations mislead by identifying the transcendental subject with the noumenal I, drawing back from his insight that the transcendental subject is a pure formal-structural function beyond the noumenal/phenomenal opposition.
Ontological Difference and Sexual Difference
The common doxa—that ontological difference is between Whatness and That-ness, liberating beings from subordination to ground—is deeply misleading. For Heidegger, ontological difference is rather the difference between entities’ stupid being-there and their horizon of meaning. Ontological difference links to sexual difference: the male side—universality and exception—is “meta-physical,” grounding reality in its constitutive exception. Ontological difference proper is feminine: reality is non-all, nothing beyond-outside it, and this Nothing is Being itself. Being cuts from within beings; ontological difference makes beings’ domain “non-all.” Because truth is non-all, telling “all the Truth” relies on an exception, a withheld secret; telling non-all truth means nothing was kept secret. Ontological difference is “minimal”—the bare minimum of difference between an entity and void—not “maximal” between all beings and something beyond. The paradox: the difference between beings and their Being “misses the difference,” reducing Being to a higher Entity.
Primordial Repression and the Binary Signifier
What is “primordially repressed” is the binary signifier.
The Stellar Parallax: The Traps of Ontological Difference
The text opens by linking a series of asexual, ghostlike figures who unite destructiveness with innocence. Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley occupies a subjective position “not yet marked by sexual difference,” akin to the Christ-like homeless young man in Kieslowski’s Decalogue and the genetically modified asexual humanoids at the end of Michel Houellebecq’s Les particules élémentaires, where humanity collectively replaces itself to escape the deadlock of sexuality. This leads to the figure of the wounded, defiant child (two to five years old) as an image of the Absolute—from photos of children dying from Chernobyl radiation to a child-porn photo of a four-year-old confronting an ejaculating penis, face covered in sperm, expressing terror and perplexity. This horrified face illustrates the Levinasian point about the wound to the face.
The Graduate and the Ethics of Sacrifice
The affair between Ben Braddock and Mrs. Robinson is usually read as proto-hippy innocence versus corrupt seduction, but Ben shows brutal self-righteousness (“Do you think I’m proud that I spend my time with a broken-down alcoholic?”). Mrs. Robinson’s reasons for forbidding Ben to date Elaine are more intense and tortured than Ben suspects. The film reproduces Mrs. Robinson’s prohibition: sex and love remain totally split (sex with Mrs. Robinson, no sexual attraction to Elaine). Mrs. Robinson is “the only true ethical figure”: her promiscuity is a “private deal with God,” like Julia’s refusal to marry Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited—she sacrifices her true love to save Elaine’s purity. Bobby Peru’s obverse sacrifice: his obscene offers must remain polite offers meant to be rejected.
Kierkegaard, Hegel, and the Analytic Process
Kierkegaard’s “infinite resignation” is meaningless sacrifice. Badiou’s “anti-philosophy” holds that there is no theory in the last resort, only a practico-ethical choice preceding theory—anticipated by Kant’s primacy of practical reason and Fichte’s claim that “what philosophy one chooses depends on what kind of man one is.” Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelianism is ambiguous: Hegel is the “systematizer,” the professor who inherits everything, who forgot “what it means that you and I and he are human beings, each one for himself.” But the link between universal System and accidental individual (Hegel writing) obeys Hegel’s “infinite judgment” (“Spirit is a bone”). Kierkegaard opposes objective thought (translating everything into results) to subjective thought (putting everything into process); only subjectivity is “in becoming,” while objective reality, however processual, is ontologically fully constituted.
The Hölderlin paradigm, from Augustine’s City of God, holds that “where the danger is grows also what can save us”—the present is the lowest point of decadence, but danger opens the possibility of reversal. Christianity’s radical twist: everything has already happened; the Messiah has already arrived. This is also Hegel’s Owl of Minerva. Kierkegaard does not rely on this paradigm—our age is ordinary. The analytic process involves two passages: possibility to necessity (the analyst as “subject supposed to know,” retroactively transforming accident into predestination) and impossibility to contingency (intrusion of the Real, surprise). The conventional view opposes Hegel’s closed circle (actualizing potential) to Kierkegaard’s open future (contingent cuts), but Hegel’s wager is to reintroduce openness of the future into the past, to grasp that-which-was in its becoming. “Progress” restores potentiality to actuality. Walter Benjamin’s revolution is redemption-through-repetition of the past: unearthing betrayed utopian potentials that haunt revolutionary memory. Schelling’s God before Creation is the domain of pure potentialities.
Kierkegaard’s God and Die Versagung
Kierkegaard’s God is correlative to the ontological openness of reality, “desubstantialized”: “the how is the what.” God passes into the Holy Spirit as the nonsubstantial link between individuals. Self-renunciation means “one understands one is capable of nothing.” Sacrifice is for nothing—”there is indeed no wherefore.” The understanding asks “what’s in it for me?” Answer: nothing. The Good is negatively determined (like Kant’s Thing-in-itself), as Simone Weil noted. God’s infallibility means man is always wrong. This is Lacan’s Versagung: loss of the Cause-Thing itself.
Lacan on Paul Claudel’s The Hostage: Sygne de Coufontaine sacrifices everything (marries the despised Toussaint Turelure, who executed her parents) to save the Pope. Her final “No” to Turelure is a compulsive tic. Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: Isabel Archer stays with Osmond—not feminine masochism, but commitment to her word; she is “the hostage of the word.” Men sacrifice for a Thing; women sacrifice for nothing. Hoens and Pluth’s reading: Sygne’s tic is a pure negation of the symbolic order, prefiguring the sinthome. The four acts are: betrothal to Georges, marriage to Turelure, intercepting the bullet, and the final “No.” The enigma is the third act, not the fourth—the “No” is not refusal of a particular content.
Law, Transgression, and Guilt
The dialectic of Law and transgression: Law itself solicits its own violation, generating the desire to “free oneself” by breaking it. Sin becomes the temptation inherent to Law. Obedience to Law is never “natural” or spontaneous but always mediated by the repression of the desire to transgress. The more rigorously we obey, the more guilty we are, because obedience functions as a defense against sinful desire. The superego feeling of guilt is therefore justified. This shift moves from psychology to the “metapsychological” symbolic order—an external machine that parasitizes upon the subject. In Kantian terms, the “Fall” is the renunciation of radical ethical autonomy: taking refuge in a heteronomous Law experienced as imposed from outside.
The Difficulty of Being a Kantian
Children’s provocations conceal a demand for authority to set firm limits (“This far and no further!”), enabling clear mapping of possibility. The analyst refuses this, which is traumatic—the absence of limits is suffocating, while firm limits liberate. Kantian autonomy implies nobody external can set my limits; I must limit my own “unruliness.” Kant’s claim that man is an animal needing a master is deceptive: the need for an external master conceals the deadlock of difficult freedom. A mature subject needs no master. Chesterton: “Every act of will is an act of self-limitation.” A promiscuous teenager’s orgies rely on the supposed purity of his mother as external guarantee. The hardest thing is enjoying without relying on another’s supposed purity—likewise, being a nonbeliever without needing another subject supposed to believe.
Lacan, Kant, and the Master
Lacan’s 1968 reply to students—”As hysterics, you want a new master. You will get one”—carries Kantian weight. Man is a hystericized animal needing a Master to set limits, provoking the Master while calling for a new one, desiring “
The Incestuous Core of The Golden Bowl
The theme of father-daughter incest emerges as a quintessentially American literary preoccupation of the early twentieth century, a coded inscription of ruthless economic exploitation. Traces appear in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and Polanski’s Chinatown, where the brutal robber baron father exerts an unimpeded right in the sexual domain, ruining his precious daughter’s life. These are “men of power who can do anything they like.” Edith Wharton, the feminine counterpart to Henry James, is deeply marked by this topic; her unpublished “Beatrice Palmato” describes father-daughter incest explicitly. This raises the question: is this the hidden reference of The Golden Bowl? What if the father’s protective attitude masks brutal capitalist exploitation and family rape—what if the ultimate protector is a rapist? In James’s novel, incest is not “real,” but its intensity is felt in the incestuous proximity of language itself: Maggie and Adam communicate almost telepathically, immediately sensing what the other aims at without needing to formulate thoughts.
Protection, Threat, and the Web of Lies
Adam, the ultimate agent of protection, is ready to do anything to shield his daughter’s innocence—yet he, as the agent of their incestuous passion, is simultaneously the greatest threat to it. Incest is both ultimate protection (the child remains safe from social circulation’s traps) and ultimate threat. The highest sacrifice falls to Adam: the most radical act of protection is for him to withdraw his protective shield, erase himself from the picture, and let his daughter go into the real world with all its dangers. When the truth about the bowl comes out, a network of protective lies explodes, ensnaring all four characters in a web of pretending not to know what they know. The shopkeeper’s words to Charlotte—”if it’s something you can’t find out, isn’t it as good as if it were nothing?”—apply to the novel’s libidinal tensions: if you don’t know about the illicit affair, that’s as good as there being no affair. The crucial point is that it doesn’t matter if he or she knows; what matters is that others do not know that he or she knows. The “big Other”—the order of social appearances—should be kept in ignorance.
Maggie’s Maneuvering and “The Great Condition”
The parallel with The Wings of the Dove is obvious: in both stories, two lovers keep their link secret to avoid hurting the innocent, rich American heiress. Unlike Kate, however, Charlotte is decidedly not ethical, nor egotistically calculating—she is simply thrown around by her passions. Is Maggie’s maneuvering ethical? Is she a new version of Isabel Archer? The ethical difference is insurmountable: Maggie does what Isabel is sometimes falsely accused of—maneuvering to maintain social appearances. Robert Pippin is right: The Golden Bowl ends “in a great moral crash,” with no solution, no act that would tear the web of lies apart. Maggie’s act endorses a false ethics of the unspoken, perfectly deployed in James’s short story “The Great Condition.” Bertram, in love with Mrs. Damerel, is bothered by rumors of her obscure past and proposes on condition she tell him all; she accepts with her own condition—she will tell him the truth six months after marriage. When Bertram withdraws, his friend Henry proposes unconditionally. Later, Bertram discovers her past is devoid of scandal, but Mrs. Damerel asks him not to tell Henry: telling him would deprive Henry of his noblesse. This logic of refusing to disclose the whole truth is profoundly ambivalent: it can indicate insistence on trust, or manipulation with a feminine secret—awareness that the shadow of illicit mystery enhances a woman’s attraction.
Plato’s Cave and the Brain-Science Variation
A Levi-Straussian reading of Plato’s cave parable seeks meaning through comparison with variations. Three postmodern inversions are identified: the sun as a “Black Sun,” a monstrous Evil Thing; the cave as a shelter built against the dangerous open surface—the first act of civilization; and the claim that the notion of “true reality” outside the shadow-theater is itself the myth. The Lacanian twist: the Real outside can appear only as a “shadow of a shadow,” a gap between different domains of shadows. Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One proposes Plato was right, except there is no observing subject in the cave—the cave projects itself onto the screen; the Self is a shadow. This is the ultimate parallax: the gap between encountering somebody and the “nothing behind” of the open skull.
Humiliations, the Event, and Consciousness
The Copernicus-Darwin-Freud narrative of “narcissistic illnesses” is complicated: humiliation generates superiority (Pascal’s insight that man knows his nullity), and this knowledge includes technological savoir-faire. Modern subjectivity is “antihumanist”: Descartes reduced man to res extensa while elevating the transcendental subject as pure immaterial void. Darwin’s unbearable discovery is that evolution is chaotic and nonteleological. Scientific discourse paradoxically requires a Master-Signifier, sustained by radical voluntarism. The twentieth century adds a turn: rehabilitating appearance itself, beginning with Husserlian phenomenology. The shift from substantial Reality to Event characterizes modern sciences. Heidegger, Deleuze, and Badiou each deploy thoughts of the Event—epochal disclosure, pure becoming of Sense, and Truth-process respectively. Badiou repeats idealism’s gesture within materialism; psychoanalysis’s achievement is that sexuality itself cannot be accounted for in evolutionary terms. The parallax gap: the same occurrences are ordinary reality to a neutral observer but an Event to an engaged revolutionary. David Chalmers’s proposal of consciousness as a new fundamental force misses “pure ideality”—it coincides with vulgar materialism. Radical materialism is nonreductionist: either subjectivity is illusion or reality is not-All.
Cartoons, Bergman, and Commodity Fetishism
Cartoons embody Deleuzian pure becoming—entities without substance, pure surface. Anxiety arises when becoming acquires autonomy. The Whip Hand inverts the alien-invasion allegory—Communists themselves are haunted by the aura of “aliens.” In Bergman’s The Mirror, a positivist rationalist confronts a theater director who stages terrifying illusions, causing the rationalist’s breakdown; Bergman is a materialist, and the stakes concern “the Real of illusions.” Marx’s commodity fetishism is proto-ideology inherent to the economic base. Fantasy is “objectively subjective”—how things objectively seem even if they don’t seem that way.
Knowing, Acknowledging, and Cloning
If one could “really know” another’s mind, intersubjectivity would disappear—the other would become a transparent machine. Not-being-knowable to others is a crucial feature of subjectivity. The zombie hypothesis is wrong because if all others are perceived as zombies, one cannot perceive oneself as having full phenomenal consciousness either. The Marx Brothers’ dialectics of identity apply to cloning: a beloved only child dies, parents clone him—the result is monstrous because the new child has all properties of the dead one, yet this very similarity makes the difference palpable. He is a terrifying impostor, not the lost son.
Three Attitudes Toward Scientific Breakthrough
Three attitudes toward how today’s sciences shatter everyday-life presuppositions: radical naturalism (the Churchlands), New Age “synthesis” (claiming quantum physics compels abandoning materialism—”
The Topological Distinction Between Subject and Object
The difference between subject and object is not a difference between two entities interacting on the same plane, but a purely topological distinction. They are one and the same X viewed from opposite sides of a Moebius strip. In Hegelian-Kierkegaardian terms, the same X is conceived either in the mode of “being” (as object, a self-identical result) or in the mode of “becoming” (as subject, a generative process). The objet petit a is the paradoxical object that directly “is” the subject.
Brain Sciences, Freedom, and Transparency
The brain sciences do not oppose freedom to genetic programming; rather, they open a space for freedom that is itself “programmed.” Neurons specialized for language atrophy without maternal stimulation, and genes lay the groundwork for unpredictable intersubjective interaction. The standard goal of “bridging the gap” between humanities and cognitivism may be the wrong task; the real problem is formulating the gap correctly. Consciousness misperceives the gap separating it from “raw nature”: the Self is its own appearance, a model that cannot perceive itself as a model. Quoting Thomas Metzinger, the “phenomenal self” is the content of a transparent self-model. Transparency is inversely proportional to introspective availability of earlier processing stages, making it paradoxically “a special form of darkness”—we cannot see something because it is transparent. This transparency operates at two levels: we don’t experience reality as representational content but as the world, and we don’t experience self-consciousness as representational but “simply as ourselves.” This mechanism is homologous to the Hegelian-Marxian critique of fetishist illusion, where the agent’s reflexive determination is misperceived as a property of the object. Metzinger applies this to the perceiving agent itself: I don’t “really exist”; I appear only as a result of a homologous fetishist illusion.
Autoepistemic Closure and the Chess Automaton
Metzinger discusses the mind’s “autoepistemic closure”: conscious experience limits possibilities for self-knowledge. This closure is an evolutionary advantage, letting the system focus on results rather than introspective exploration of steps. Phenomenal selfhood results from this closure—it is a lack of information. No selves exist in the world; only information-processing systems engaged in transparent phenomenal self-modeling. Walter Benjamin’s chess automaton metaphor illustrates this: a mechanical figure plays chess, winning, with a hidden man inside making moves. Cognitivists use this to show we are puppets while neuronal automata do reasoning. Benjamin uses it for historical materialism, with theology hidden inside. The question arises: what if there is no hidden puppet, only a blind automaton? Some New-Age cognitivists displace free agency to a substantial “Me” behind the “I,” but the cognitivist stance only requires that conscious decisions are predetermined by asubjective processes. As true Freudians, we should reject “Me” as a substantial background of the ego. One can distinguish experiential closure (necessarily misperceiving ourselves as acting freely) from cognitive closure (knowledge deemed unattainable). The Self is exceptional: it exists only as phenomenon, with no “true substance” beneath its self-appearance. The Freudian symptom exists only insofar as its causality is unknown—literally embodied ignorance. Metzinger’s closure is strictly phenomenal, a necessary illusion, not an a priori limitation. One can cognitively know the theory but cannot “really believe” it—a fetishist disavowal, like Marxian commodity fetishism.
Critique of Damasio and Dennett’s Radical Kantianism
The critique of Damasio’s account of racism fails to explain how racist disgust arises as displacement from another traumatic experience, and how it combines with perverted pleasure and envy. Lacan’s anti-Darwinian lesson emphasizes man’s radical dis-adaptation: “being-human” consists in uncoupling from environmental immersion, following automatism that ignores adaptive demands—the “death drive.” This represents minimum freedom, behavior uncoupled from utilitarian-survivalist attitudes. Dennett’s polemic against the “Cartesian Theater” was anticipated by Tolstoy, whose anthropology centers on “infection”: the human subject is a passive medium infected by affect-laden cultural elements. Tolstoy is more radical than Dawkins, as Dennett criticizes Dawkins via Rorty’s question about demonstrating scientific virtues are good. Dennett demonstrates we literally “see” concepts and judgments—seeing “a room full of red chairs” involves test glances and “concluding” all are red. This is more radical than Kant: the very content seen results from previous judgment. Hence “There are no qualia”—no direct contact with reality precedes mental elaboration. Phenomenology treats dead metaphors as sedimentations of lived experience, but dialectics proper holds that form has precedence over content; the first signifier is empty, a zero-signifier. Engels’s error regarding “punalua” family shows the term was “metaphor” from the beginning. Dialectical process begins with alienation, keying Hegel’s formula that the secrets of the Egyptians were also secrets for themselves. This alienated meaning appears in Eric Ambler’s Journey into Fear, where a hero advocating Socialism to embarrass his wife ends as an authentic Socialist. Marx’s “formal subsumption” of productive forces under capital precedes material subsumption, with no change in the mode of production itself. Hegel’s empty, purely formal gesture—the burial ritual—formally subsumes death under the symbolic regime. This contrasts with the “silent weaving of the Spirit,” which concerns form itself, not content.
Aesthetic Display, Sexuality, and Anti-Semitism
Nonfunctional “aesthetic” display is primordial in produced objects, with utility being a secondary by-product. Language is a “mental fitness indicator” with excessive display of useless rhetoric. Miller overlooks a fundamental shift between the sexes: in animals, the male displays, but in humans, women are expected to dress provocatively. The key may be that only in humans is an instrument elevated into an end in itself. Pinker proposes the mind rises to a biologically pointless challenge: getting at pleasure circuits without fitness increments. The enigma is how a by-product of goal-oriented activity becomes an aim in itself, exemplified by sexuality, where pleasure becomes an aim, even blocking the original goal through contraception. Miller’s Freudian lesson is that the explosion of symbolic capacities sexualizes sexuality itself; only when animal coupling is caught in the self-referential vicious circle of drive do we get sexuality. The uniqueness of humankind may consist in how fitness indicators turn into ends in themselves, reducing biological survival to a mere means. Milner argues democracy is based on a short circuit between majority and the All. Europe is constituting itself as an unlimited political non-All through unification, requiring erasing divisive historical traditions. This Europe needs the figure of the “Jew” as a structural obstacle, with anti-Semitism displaced from Jews as an ethnic group to the State of Israel. The Jews stand for the Fourfold, the exchange of generations sustained by the Law. The figure of the “Jew” is elevated into an index of an ontological limit, standing for human finitude, symbolic tradition, and paternal Law—the objet petit a, the obstacle which sustains desire. Weaknesses in Milner’s version include whether all we find beyond the Law is really only the dream of full jouissance, and whether secularized Judaism is not a key source of European modernity.
Scale-Free Networks, the New Proletariat, and Heidegger
The 80/20 rule operates through “scale-free networks,”
The End of the Revolutionary Sequence
Fitzpatrick’s argument locates the true end of the October Revolution’s dynamic not in 1921 or with the NEP, but in the late 1920s, when collectivization and rapid industrialization finally aimed at transforming society’s very composition—liquidating peasants as individual owners and replacing the old intelligentsia. The revolutionary sequence closed only in 1937, when the purges were cut short to prevent the complete “suicide of the party,” allowing the nomenklatura to stabilize into a “new class.” The vivid measure of this transformation: an emigrant returning to Moscow in 1924 would recognize the city; returning in 1934, he would not. Despite the horrors, one discerns a sincere, enthusiastic will toward total upheaval.
The Prisoner Building His Own Monument
The fate of Jože Jurančič, an old Slovene Communist revolutionary, exemplifies the “universal singular.” In 1943, he led a rebellion of Yugoslav prisoners on the Adriatic island of Rab, disarming 2,200 Italian soldiers with 2,000 starving prisoners. After the war, he was imprisoned on Goli otok, the Communist concentration camp, where he was mobilized to build a monument celebrating the tenth anniversary of the very rebellion he had led—a prisoner building a monument to himself. This is “reflexive” betrayal: sacrificing everything for the Cause, then rejected by the Cause’s bearers. The position mirrors those who warned about Saddam Hussein’s weapons when the USA supported him, now hearing that mantra turned against themselves—a claim the US administration has no right to utter without admitting responsibility, like Stalin discovering in late 1930 that Yezhov was responsible for thousands of deaths.
Stalinism, Fascism, and the Enlightenment
Only in Stalinism are people enslaved on behalf of an ideology claiming all power is theirs. Stalinist discourse is contagious—people mockingly imitate it. Post-Communist countries have invented Communist tradition as a cultural phenomenon, erasing political aspects and replacing them with everyday objects evoking a simpler life: “Goodbye Lenin” is tolerated, “Goodbye Hitler” is not; GDR Party songs are sold on CDs, Nazi songs are not. In Stalinist show trials, the accused confesses publicly—meaningless in Nazism, where Jewish guilt was a biological fact, not a matter of subjective responsibility. Stalinism conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, where truth is accessible to any rational man. The wandering “eternal Jew” figure rose precisely when capitalism extended Jewish attributes over all society; when the specific Jew disappeared, the absolute Jew emerged, shifting anti-Semitism from theology to race—guilty for what they were, not what they did. Nietzsche’s proposal to breed a new caste by mixing German and Jewish races combines two incompatible fantasies, like the beer advertisement where a girl kisses a frog that becomes a man, who kisses her and turns her into a beer bottle—we can have either a woman with a frog or a man with a bottle, never the “natural” couple. Modern art opposes not objective reality but the underlying fantasy. Milner compared Rousseau to Stalinist show trials: “in the matter of confessions, Geneva does not necessarily win over Moscow.” After a Nazi leader’s speech, he stands silently accepting applause; in Stalinism, the leader joins the applause. Prisoners sent Stalin birthday telegrams from the Gulags; one cannot imagine Jews from Auschwitz sending Hitler birthday wishes. Stalinism did not sever the last thread linking it to civilization—the lowest Gulag inmate still had access to the Truth of History. Anti-Communists argue the ex-GDR had 100,000 secret police agents while the Gestapo had only 10,000, but this demonstrates the opposite: the degree of ordinary Germans’ participation in political terror, where denunciations functioned by themselves. Massive moral corruption was more widespread in Nazism; noncorruption in Communist societies was sustained by an ideology preaching ordinary people’s solidarity.
The Analyst’s Discourse and the New Master
Lacan’s statement on jealousy applies to anti-Semitism: even if Nazi claims about Jews were true, their anti-Semitism would be pathological because it represses the true reason they needed it. The discourse of the analyst “produces” the Master-Signifier, a swerve of the patient’s knowledge that situates it at the level of truth—after this production, the “same” knowledge functions differently. Today, bombarded by the superego injunction “Enjoy!”, psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy. The link between analyst and patient involves money—a price that hurts—making the link real, not just symbolic. The analyst is compared to the Jewish moneylender of the nineteenth-century novel, a disillusioned secret master; for Lacan, the miser, not the heroic transgressor, is the exemplary figure of desire. Lacan introduces the “desire of the analyst” to establish the possibility of a collective of analysts, a social link between them. The high-stakes question: is every community based on a Master or Knowledge, or is a different link possible? The outcome was a failure from Freud to Lacan’s Ecole, but the fight is worth pursuing—the “properly Leninist moment of Lacan.” Chiesa raises the question: should we stick to the revolutionary dream of a society without the tension between public Law and its obscene superego supplement? The Spartan state is cited as a rare attempt to mitigate this tension, with its three-caste pyramid condensing serfdom, capitalism, and communism—the rulers lived in a permanent state of emergency, as if their position were obscene and illegal. This model is also found in the Khmer Rouge regime, where leaders were referred to anonymously as “Brother No. 1.” The lesson: the “truth” about power is that it is an obscene excess; the attempt to establish “pure” power reverts to a power that relates to itself as an obscene excess. Miller emphasizes that today’s hegemonic discourse is that of the Analyst, not the Master; the more radical conclusion is that since the Unconscious has the structure of the Master’s discourse, and if the Unconscious is disappearing, the analyst’s task should be to construct new Master-Signifiers—Lacan’s “vers un signifiant nouveau” as a call to counteract the disintegration of a consistent World in late capitalism.
Prescription and the Politics of Equality
Hallward diagnoses the post-1989 predicament: the Left split between pragmatic-realist liberals and those clinging to radical Change with a self-defeating Messianism of permanent “to-come.” Hallward discerns a new “principal contradiction”: convergence of draconian neo-liberal adjustment with aggressive imperial intervention facing new resistance. Citing Rancière: “equality is not a goal to be attained but a point of departure, a supposition to be maintained in all circumstances.” Prescription posits an axiom as starting point, demanding direct installation—”Prescription ignores deferral, it operates in a present illuminated through anticipation of its future.” It involves circular-retroactive temporality: treating the axiom as already realized. Sartre: “first you decide, then you justify the decision.” This isn’t “irrationalist decisionism” but the theological “perspective of the Last Judgment.” John Brown practiced egalitarianism as a first step toward ending slavery, treating African Americans as equals through actions. Zapatero directly installed political equality of women as an axiom after his 2004 victory, appointing women to half his Cabinet posts.
The Fundamentalist and the Enigma of the Other’s Desire
The discussion returns to the figure of the fundamentalist, whose immediate identification with his fantasy closes the gap of the Other’s desire. This is illustrated by a UK analytic case of a rape victim who was more disturbed by her attacker’s polite withdrawal to put on a condom than by the brutality itself—the gesture’s ambiguity (care or self-protection?) confronting her with the impenetrable enigma of the Other’s desire. This encounter can follow either alienation or separation; the key Hegelian shift is recognizing that our alienation from the Other is already the Other’s alienation from itself, generating separation as the overlapping of two lacks.
American Fundamentalism and Scientology
American Christian fundamentalism is a paradoxical, postmodern phenomenon. Scientology’s rise is relevant: L. Ron Hubbard, a science-fiction writer, presented his literary fiction as “serious” religious texts, reversing modernity’s trajectory where religious texts survive as art. Similarly, the Left Behind series depicts millions disappearing, the Antichrist (a Romanian UN General Secretary) imposing anti-American world government, and non-Christians being burned. The author notes the double standard: a similar Muslim story would cause outcry, yet here “serious” religious message overlaps with the lowest commercial trash.
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ
Critics of Gibson’s film seem justified, yet Pope John Paul II’s ambivalent reaction (“It is as it was!”) illustrates what’s wrong with liberal tolerance: aggressive religious passion is merely repressed, smoldering stronger. This compromise resembles the enlightened anti-Semite who blames Jews for killing Christ without believing in his divinity. The film’s ridiculous situation shows the impossibility of returning to religious fundamentalism against liberal multiculturalism—without subtitles, intended fidelity becomes incomprehensible exotic spectacle. The film loses authentic Christian experience, becoming the ultimate sacrilege: Christ’s suffering staged as sado-maso gay spectacle.
Three Versions of the Crucifixion’s Meaning
The film lacks inquiry into why Christ had to die. Three versions exist: Gnostic-dualist (price paid to the Devil), sacrificial (payment for our sins), and exemplary (inspiring people to be good). Missing is the fourth, the truth of the first three: what if Christ’s death was God-the-Father’s way to repay his own debt to humanity, to excuse himself for creating an imperfect world full of suffering?
The Obscene Knot of Ideology
The Master-Signifier means nothing in particular; it is articulated only as a tautology. The emptiness of a threat is what makes it threatening, inviting fantasy to fill it with imagined horrors. Sovereignty involves the logic of the universal and its constitutive exception: the rule of Law is sustained by a sovereign power that reserves the right to suspend it. Today, the threat is externalized into the Enemy—the invisible threat legitimizes the preemptive strike. The power that presents itself as under threat and merely defending itself is the most dangerous kind, the model of Nietzschean ressentiment. Terror is the “constitutive outside” of democracy, spectral and without a visible center, resulting in a reflexive reversal: the USA itself emerges as the main enemy.
Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby’s Smile
Conspiracy theories cannot be dismissed as the poor man’s ideology—actual conspiracies exist. Today, the ultimate ideology is the self-complacent dismissal of conspiracies as mere fantasies. In old capitalism, the appearance of Order masked underlying chaos; today, the appearance of “chaos” masks unprecedented state control. In accusations about “fundamentalism,” the Evil resides in the gaze which perceives it. The Balkans became “Balkan” at the moment of exposure to European modernization—the features associated with them come from Western Europe itself, a Hegelian “reflexive determination.” The Armenian genocide and Kurdish oppression were executed by military modernizers, not traditionalists. Mladen Dolar’s quip: the European unconscious is structured like the Balkans.
The Parallax of Democracy and Evaluation
Democracy presupposes alienation: a minimal distance of representation. In “totalitarianism,” the Leader directly represents the people, and the empirical people are alienated from themselves. Evaluation is crucial: if all subjects are equal, reduced to empty places, evaluation distributes them. Egalitarian justice sustained by envy relies on inversion: “I am ready to renounce it, so that others will also not have it!” What is disappearing in the public display of intimate details is public life itself. We are witnessing renaturalization: public issues are retranslated into questions about intimate idiosyncrasies. Marx quotes Dogberry: “To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by nature”—today, being a computer expert is nature, beautiful lips are culture.
The Spectral Real and Its Versions
The spectral Real appears in three versions: the shadow of spectral entities accompanying fully constituted reality; the inscription of the gaze itself into perceived reality; the multiplication of realities themselves. The link between these versions: the gap separating reality from its proto-ontological spectral shadow concerns the way the subject relates to reality—this gap marks the inscription of the subject’s gaze into perceived reality. When gaze is included, we no longer have one fully constituted reality with multiple shadows, but a multitude of realities emerging against the background of the indistinct preontological Real.
Spinoza’s Obscene Doubles
Blinded by the “French” Spinoza, other readings should not be forgotten. Spinoza was a crucial reference for Plekhanov, who elevated Marxism into an all-encompassing world-view and designated it as “modern Spinozism.” The reference is central to Leo Strauss, father figure of US neoconservatives: for Strauss, Spinoza provides a model for the split between popular ideology and true knowledge accessible only to the few. Spinoza’s anti-Cartesian teaching is considered an authority by cognitivists—Damasio wrote Looking for Spinoza. Every postmodern “French” figure of Spinoza is accompanied by an obscene disavowed double: Althusser’s proto-Marxist Spinoza “with Plekhanov”; Negri’s anti-Empire Spinoza “with Leo Strauss”; Deleuze’s Spinoza of affects “with Damasio.”
The Loop of Freedom and the End
The parallax shift from “inside” to “outside” is not symmetrical: in the first case, we shift from subjective empathy to desubjectivized object; in the second, the object remains a foreign body resisting subjectivization, and as such “humanizes” itself—the object that talks remains a monstrosity. With “thick consciousness” a gap becomes tangible in agnosia: the sufferer perceives forms and colors but does not “see” anything, unable to recognize objects. Perceptive mechanisms function normally at the level of the Real, but he cannot subjectivize input—sensations remain objective. There is a radical discontinuity between “objective” sensations and “subjective” perceptions; sensations are not basic elements of perceptions. In Kill Bill 2, the Uma Thurman character kills Bill with blows around the heart; he walks around normally for a minute before collapsing, aware of his predicament as a living dead—the loop of freedom closes with the recognition that the subject, like Bill, is already dead, sustained only by the parallax gap between its symbolic and real existence.
