Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

by Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Zizek's masterwork on the Hegelian legacy.

For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, whose influence each new thinker tries in vain to whether in the name of the pre-rational Will, the social process of production, or the contingency of individual existence. Hegel's absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the dominant philosopher of the epochal historical transition to modernity; a period with which our own time shares startling similarities.

Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new transition. In Less Than Nothing, the pinnacle publication of a distinguished career, Slavoj Zizek argues that it is imperative that we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs,overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Zizek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought--Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel. |||This book is sold in the US by Sony Electronics Inc.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Politics, Psychoanalysis, History, Sociology

1056 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.

He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).

Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."

Reviews

[Zawn V · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a cardinal rule of pretentious academic existence that anyone who fancies herself a philosopher has to love Hegel. I've spent an embarrassing amount of time studying philosophy and even managed to pick up one of those fancy philosophy degrees that no one wants. But I'm just going to come right out and say it: I hate Hegel. I hate him so much that I seriously contemplated taking antidepressants during an undergraduate class on The Phenomenology of Spirit. I broke my computer trying to write a paper during the same class. And no, I didn't break it because I was typing furiously, inspired by new ideas. I broke it having a massive temper tantrum that has left my long-suffering dog permanently traumatized. Instead of re-reading Hegel to inspire further understanding (or further suicidal ideation), I responded to the Phenomenology of Spirit by making a video involving puppets, robots and a rapping dog all emphasizing exactly how much Hegel sucks. That is how much I hate this philosopher.

But the thing is, I really love Zizek. Even when he goes off on his insane rants wherein everything somehow ties back to Lacan, vampires or communism, I find myself swooning. I love him so much that I have spent a significant portion of my time trying to convince my husband that, were I to actually meet Zizek, we would immediately become best friends and would wear matching friendship bracelets. I've always ignored Zizek's respect for Hegel, thinking it was just one of his many weird predilections that I don't really need to understand.

But Zizek has sold me. Hegel is not all of the horrible things I have called him (but damnit, he is some of them). It took a crazed Slovenian philosopher to help me appreciate a crazed German one. I'm not ready to drink the kool-aid of Hegel being the greatest philosopher ever just yet, but it's a start. And it's a tribute to Zizek that I've made that start. Don't read all of the critical readers and guides to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Read this.

For Zizek fans, this book is a breath of fresh air. I've complained quite a bit about Zizek repackaging and recycling old material into a "new" book every six months or so. But this one is truly novel, and it's probably his most well-written work to date.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

A boring book about Hegel. And Lacan.

For years Slavoj had suggested that his books were simply a means to distract him from working on his big book about Hegel. Now we have his big book on Hegel and it may serve to distract us from reading Hegel himself. But of course we will need to read Hegel. And Marx. And Lacan. And Heidegger. And Deleuze. And Freud. And Paul. And Hitchcock. And. . .

I love Žižek. He is the objet a. To misrepresent the thought of Friend (Friar) Jeremy, the only true reason to not read Žižek is because one already reads Hegel and Marx and Lacan et al. He is the surplus enjoyment of philosophy, that je ne sais quoi which is in excess of its series and which compels one to circulate around that never quite completed thought, the inversion of what is at first the wrong choice into what can only find enjoyment in its stupid circulation. There is a brute stupidity in this compulsion which readers of Žižek such as myself find utterly entrancing, preferring this hardness to the unbearable Dummheit of entertainment, that most deep enmeshment in ideology. But enough of my stupidity. This is not a book for the stupid; it is a book for the imbecile, those of us lacking the becile, who ‘know that the big Other does not exist.”

Less Than Nothing counts as (one of) Žižek's masterwork(s). It is a book on Hegel and the redoubling or repetition of Hegel within the thought of Lacan. He has not written a commentary on any one of Hegel's texts and one will not find here an introduction to the thought of Hegel. What he endeavors to do here is articulate the present tense relevance for Hegel, what Hegel looks like today in the world of post-Hegelian thought. Žižek is engaged in a battle to salvage Hegel, the pinnacle of German Idealism, from a host of straw man (cartoonish) caricatures of Hegel which served as easy means for appearing to allow one to 'go beyond Hegel.' What Žižek presents here is a sustained engagement with claims made by thinkers that they have 'overcome' Hegelian dialectics, having either gotten Hegel wrong, missed the very Hegelian moments of their own thought, or missed a piece of the phenomenon or bit of the real, the kernel of the problem or its solution.

Less Than Nothing is more rigorously structured than the classic form of the Žižekian text which often consists of digressions from the digression which opens the work. Here we have the structure of ‘there is a non-(sexual)relation.’ We open with the drink before followed by the two Things themselves -- Hegel and Lacan -- wrapped up with the cigarette after.

The drink before is a tripartite treatment of Plato’s Parmenides, Christianity, and Fichte. From the Parmenides Žižek takes us through Plato’s dialectical treatment of the relation between the 8(+1) hypotheses in regard to the question of the One and Being: if the One is, if the One is not, if there is One. . . , if there is no One. . . etc. In his treatment of Christianity Žižek continues (or repeats) his thesis that when Christ was crucified, God died. The recovery of the radical emancipatory collective, the early church, from this catastrophe of God consists in actualizing Hegel’s Absolute Spirit: “fully assuming the big Other’s inexistence, that is to say, the inexistence of the big Other as the subject-supposed-to-know.” Concerning Fichte Žižek analyzes the rise of the subject as a response to the Antoss, that object which impedes the subject, but even as its impediment becomes the very condition of the rise of the subject.

“The Thing Itself: Hegel” addresses three questions regarding Hegel: Is it still possible to be a Hegelian today?; what is this about dialectics?; and, what it means to think Hegel’s ‘not only as Substance, but also as Subject’? Interspersed between the sections are three Interludes which deal with the question of the relationship between Hegel and Marx, the relation between the cogito and Foucault’s work on madness, and development of the concept of the monarch from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

The three sections of “The Thing Itself: Lacan” treat the relation between Hegel and Lacan, the notions of ‘suture’ and ‘pure difference,’ and the status of the various forms of ‘the object’ in Lacan’s work. The interludes here address the interplay between past and future in determining what has been (a kind of retroactive formation of teleology), a critique of Meillassoux’s rejection of ‘correlationism’ and his attempt to return to a realism without a subject, and a critique of Hofstadter’s cognitivism.

The cigarette after recovers us through a treatment Badiou’s thought, Heidegger’s thinking, and quantum physics. Žižek is very close to Badiou, but the essay here is insightful to see at which points Žižek wants to differentiate himself from Badiou. Žižek’s piece on Heidegger is the most extended engagement with Heidegger, to my knowledge, in all of Žižek’s corpus. One almost wishes that we could expect a big Heidegger book from Slavoj, being as Žižek began his philosophical studies as a Heideggarian. Finally, Žižek’s study on quantum physics is to be taken with a great deal of interest by those who believe that quantum physics as changed all our notions about reality. What is usually missed when wild claims are made about quantum physics is the symbolic (mathematized) form in which theoretical physics dwells. Žižek’s Hegelian working through of the deadlocks of quantum physics ought to be required reading for anyone interested in the relation between ontology and theoretical physics.

So much for a poor reconstruction of the Table of Contents. I suggest perusing the ToC and the “Introduction: Eppur Si Muove” available at google books here. The amazon preview is incomplete.

If we can note in a summary fashion why we will read this book we should indicate those positions on behalf of which Žižek is fighting tooth and nail, and to which precisely Hegel can give us access. First, as Žižek has been arguing for years, is the return to a concept of the subject or cogito which is not reducible to any lower ontic level, but is itself that which transcendentally constitutes reality. Second is Žižek’s materialism, and of course his materialism is a dialectical materialism which can be understood variously according to Lacan’s thesis on sexuation: either we can say ‘Everything is material. . .with the exception of the subject,’ or we can say ‘Material is non-All, there is the subject which is not material.’ (Similar here is the opposition to ‘democratic materialism’ in which there are ‘only bodies and discourse’ but which is supplemented by dialectical materialism, ‘except for Truth.’) Žižek develops from both stances the manner in which the transcendental subject arises from flat, stupid matter, as ‘nature out-of-joint’, and which is not a mere illusion or epiphenomenon but very much a part of reality, not something added on. From this perspective it is not so much the question ‘How can we know reality behind the appearances?’ but rather, ‘How can appearances arise out of flat, undifferentiated reality? How can reality appear to something like a subject of experience?‘ Žižek’s value lies in his obstinate fidelity to the Events of the Subject and of Truth.

The Obligatory Thing: In this book the jokes are restrained and serve more as structuring leitmotifs, and references to and illustrations from film and pop culture are relatively restrained, almost relying on our prior familiarity with his standard set of references. Here Žižek is largely that serious philosopher for which reason many of us read him, while the popular media's clown caricaturization finds itself mostly absent. Is it possible to account for the media's caricature of Žižek-the-clown by understanding the media as largely narcissistic, finding everywhere its own image reflected back to itself?

Žižek’s masterpiece will be torn to shreds for years to come. What will not disappear is that Spectre of Hegel, that Spectre which has still not disappeared, even as the vanishing mediator between pre-Hegelian philosophy and post-Hegelian thought.

For further reading I would draw your attention to a few recent works on Hegel on which Žižek himself relies and deems 'epochal' (p 17 n15):
Catherine Malabou's The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic
Beatrice Longuenesse's Hegel's Critique of Metaphysics
Rebecca Comay's Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution
Gerard Lebrun's La patience du concept

[Geoff]

A Note On These Notes:
They are nothing more than my personal notes, they are not a "review", they will be ongoing throughout my reading of Less Than Nothing and they are simply things I wish to return to and explore more or designate with a digital place-marker in this review-space, mainly to document my progress in coming to understand ideas I do not currently understand. That being said, if you happen to read over this and wish to comment, add, clarify, discuss, question, correct, etc., please feel abundantly free to do so in the comments. I am a student here, and any voluntary teachers are welcome pedants.

Introduction: Eppur Si Muove

-Galileo’s “Eppur Si Muove”- in a modern sense, “although someone who possesses true knowledge is forced to renounce it, this does not stop it from being true”; or, to assert a deeper symbolic truth about something which is literally not true (such as the story of Galileo uttering these words- there is no evidence of it occurring, but it asserts the “truth” of his situation recanting a fact he indeed believed before the inquisition)- the Eppur Si Muove of reality that must be supplanted by fictions- fictions describe a symbolic truth that the recounting of “facts” cannot. Reality in itself is Nothing, therefore Fiction is required to create a reality that speaks of Reality.

-the Higgs field as quantum evidence that “something comes from nothing”-- and yet it moves and vacillates the void

-”democratic materialism” (according to Badiou): 1) scientific naturalism; 2) discursive historicism (Foucault); 3) new age “western buddhism”; 4) transcendental finitude (“the abyss is none other than the transcendental finitude of human reason...”)- here Žižek asserts that one aim of Less Than Nothing is to find the core of modern subjectivity in a “pre-transcendental rupture” that is missed by these four positions of today’s “ideological-philosophical field”. This concept of the “pre-transcendental rupture”, is, for now, over my head. I await elucidation.

-Kant as the point of a shift in philosophy from Platonic ideal forms (appearance as an illusory and defective mode) to an attempt at “discerning the conditions of possibility of this appearing of things”.

-to describe a noumenal reality is an impossible task; “successful (“true”) philosophy is no longer defined by its truthful explanation of the totality of being, but by successfully accounting for the illusions, that is, by explaining not only why illusions are illusions, but why they are structurally necessary, unavoidable, and not just accidents.”- This was the first assertion of this book that really struck me. As someone who does not read much philosophy, who does not dwell in these thoughts, it was an utterly new and stimulating idea that philosophy is no longer a search for a unity in reality, but a kind of cataloging of the errors in thinking about or approaching reality. The repercussions here are delectable. That reality is somehow “coded” incompletely, built on a faulty structure, that we do not transcend the contradictions in the structures of reality, but account for the lack and incorporate that lack into our existential worldview. This is a lovely, and unmooring conclusion. Elsewhere I have either read or heard Žižek in an interview paint a picture of reality in these terms: consider yourself a character in a video game, you approach a house that from all external signs looks like any other normal house, but you find when you try that you cannot enter the house- the problem is not that your video game avatar is attempting to enter the front door incorrectly, but that the inside of the house was not programmed! That the contradictions and the antinomies we come up against in our approaching reality philosophically, through reason, (or even in science, math, etc.) are the result of an incomplete or insufficient “programming” of reality, material space, is an absolutely jaw-dropping idea.

-The “double negation” that causes Being, as found in Holderlin, etc. The organic unity of the universe pre-consciousness; the separation from that unity by negating the void, self-consciousness, to become a Subject one is “cast out of oneness with the whole”. Reflecting on being, being and reflection, are only mediated through a narrative that we form to explain our separation from the whole, the “big Other”. The narrative form reconciles identity- “it is our very division from absolute Being which unites us with it, since this division is immanent to Being.” “Being emerges when division divides itself from itself.” A person, consciousness, Subject, telling itself the narrative of its being is “simultaneously the story Being is telling itself about itself.” The split from the organic whole, the “big Other”, is re-united, and Being re-accessed, by the narrative form. Fiction, the symbolic truth, is Being, the voice of Being; the “signifying intervention” of narrativization, language as the mediator of reality, reconciles the division from some organic unity or Other by being Being explaining Being to itself.

Part I: The Drink Before

-The inversion of Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent” in relation to aesthetic representation of the Holocaust. “What cannot be said must be shown”. This was a brilliant section. The basic argument is countering the notion that “after the Holocaust poetry cannot exist”. However, recounting the pure facts of the Holocaust in, say, documentary form, would be a disrespectful obscenity towards the victims; there is no one ready or able to listen nor witness these atrocities; recounting the facts would not transmit the trauma of the event, it would neutralize the impact of events- “when truth is too traumatic to be confronted directly, it can only be accepted in the guise of a fiction”- or, the converse, recounting the truth numbs the impact because “truth has the structure of a fiction”. Only through the transformation of historical events to the “symbolic truth” of a narrative, a fictionalization can “show” the effect of the trauma “in the distortion of our speech about the trauma”. Jorge Semprun’s novel “The Long Voyage” and the fractured space-time, fractured identity, the subject on the cramped train to Buchenwald and his leaps in time, fantasy, past-present-future presented in the Einsteinian mode- all present at once, unbound by the limits of our senses- the trauma has unmoored the protagonist, “unstuck” him in time. Only through these aesthetic attempts at representation can something like the “truth” of a represented event emerge. “Witnessing is impossible, since the true witness is already dead and we can only speak on his behalf.” Also, “there is no proper public, no listener adequate to receive the witnessing”. When language is no longer available as a means of containing the effect of what we wish to translate, the “big Other” begins to recede, to dwindle. Nothing is there to verify testimony. The story in Eternity is no longer guaranteed a voice. The intervening/mediating form of language must be employed to preserve a knowledge of the trauma- “What cannot be said must be shown” so that history's lessons are somehow preserved when there are no witnesses left to testify. Silence is the abyss.

(...)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


I am officially "currently-reading" this monster. My intent is to use this review space as a notebook with which to keep track of my inevitably confused, incorrect, and poor readings of Žižek, Hegel, Schelling, Kant, Fichte, Badiou, et al, because I am horribly under-read in philosophy. That being said, I read through the introduction, Eppur Si Muove, and I'm fairly sure, at least on a basic primitive level, I "got it"- Žižek's premise and intent. I will be reading this slowly, over a long period of time, underneath and behind other fictions and The Wake, and I am hoping that my sporadic notes here will engender CONVERSATIONS and CLARIFICATIONS and INTERVENTIONS from the Goodreads community as a whole, because there is an undeniable intellectual attraction between myself and this book and its ideas that I am trying to feel my way through, and I do plan on seeing it through to the end. Please feel free to butt in as you please, with corrections, comments, etc., as I fill this note-space with the digressions and the speculations of an idiot hoping to achieve to the level of an imbecile.

[Joshua Stein · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was, for me, an exercise in persistence. I'm not much of a fan of Zizek, but I really enjoy reading good Hegel scholarship (and scholarship in continental philosophy generally) so one of my friends who does enjoy Zizek foisted the book on me, extending me an opportunity to read it for free... It took me several months, as those who look at the reading log will note, for several reasons. The first is that while Zizek has a distinctive writing style that is engaging for his typical readers, I find the persistent pop-cultural references and redundancy really exhausting. The second is that the book really isn't about Hegel; the book is about Zizek's reappropriation of post-Hegelian ideas, which is something that he's already discussed at length in much of his other work where he deals with Freud and Lacan and various other French figures that are major influences on his scholarship.

The Hegel scholarship in the book is, at best, specious. There are a number of claims made about Hegel and rationalism and idealism that might be plausible interpretations, but they require argumentation that Zizek doesn't give; he instead asserts a claim about something Hegel held as a position and then moves on to explain his application of it in his cultural criticism or political criticism... Even if he had good reasons for asserting these interpretations of Hegel, he does not offer them up and, in the course of 1,000 pages, that isn't really acceptable.

I understand why people like Zizek. There's a definite style and rhythm to his writing; he does a good job at painting a picture that supports his claims about culture. (Though those pictures are not the sort of thing I tend to find compelling, since they're generally meant to be evocative, and not particularly deeply invested in argument, as typically understood.) There's also a set of claims that arouse a lot of empathy from activists and critics who are looking for an angle on modernity and capitalism; but even there I can't help but think that there are more successful and engaging scholars coming out of the radical movement. (Even less intellectual, more politically oriented people like Sam Webb are more satisfying for me, personally; ultimately I disagree with many of the conclusions, but I tend to suggest that folks who are sympathetic to that sort of radicalism look there rather than towards Zizek.)

There are many major and minor criticisms to be lobbed at Zizek. Most of my peers in philosophy don't think he's a serious academic. (There are reasons for that, though it is a bit harsh as a claim, and they've rarely read him seriously enough to make it.) Many more think that he's just a sort of wingnut attempting to make headlines and be sensational. Those things are not really pertinent to my criticism of the book, and if the only reservations I had about it was that it might lead readers to cast him that way, I would recommend it to some limited group who might gain something from experiencing that view of him. But that's not the problem with the book. The problem with the book, and the reason why I can't recommend it, is that it is a ponderous book that purports to be an exposition on Hegel that wanders around and around without delving into the central ideas that made, and continue to make, Hegel a central figure of interest for so many philosophers, cultural critics, and political thinkers. That does not make for a good read.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know describing any Zizek book as "his most coherent" is like congratulating a Bob Dylan performance on being his "least nasal" but if one book can be said to finally put lazy criticism of Zizek to rest then this should be it.

It's not perfect (even though I gave it 5 stars), but what book of philosophy is? Generally speaking, Zizek is trying to "do Hegel again" whilst filtering in Lacan and Marx, reinterpreting Meilassoux, Butler, Heidegger, Jameson and Freud, as well as exploring the Hegelian sides of speculative realism and quantum physics. In fact, this latter chapter is one of his strongest, showing a direct engagement with ideas above and beyond philosophy and psychoanalysis and refusing to descend into self-parody. This is perhaps the book's key strength: Zizek is less willing to simply repeat a bunch of now tired movie references and jokes from the old country. Instead he directly engages with a range of topics over a series of lengthy chapters with heavy theory and minimal nonsense (although fans of his meandering and tangents will not be disappointed in a few places).

The book is by no means "entry level". Many of the early chapters baffled me as I have no background or even the remotest hint of knowledge in German Idealism (I hoped this would teach me a bit about Hegel). While I know more about Hegel in his Zizekian form after reading this, I can certainly say that it was a hard slog. If you've read Zizek before then the sections on Lacan and Marx are not too taxing, and a little knowledge of Deleuze wouldn't go amiss either. However, if you're willing to pile through the stuff that's incredibly difficult, there are some absolute gems in there (like the previously mentioned chapter on quantum mechanics, his engagement with Badiou's theory of the event and his criticism of speculative realism). As a whole it is not perfectly formed, still having "interludes" that don't often stand out as obvious links between sections, but it reads as a lot more of a consistent piece than his other works. For this, it should be read as his masterpiece- the "go to" for those who wish to read Zizek at his best, his clearest and his most honest.

[Alex Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is "less than nothing" is what is lost in order to maintain the relationship between subject and object. This nothing sustains the dialectic, but it’s also the ground that is synthesized in Hegel's dialectical project. But really, this nothing is also the "form" by which phenomenon is understood. That is to say, coming from Kant, understanding or the law of desire is the pure nothingness that imposes the order we see in the chaotic world.

It's actually pretty simple. The universal, the a priori, is the emptiness that is lost in understanding the Real. This is because we can’t apprehend understanding directly; we can only see it through the empirical world. The closest we get to understanding itself, so to speak, is the petit object a, the pure signifier that is its own lack necessarily: without this particle of necessary being we wouldn't be able to see being in the world at all. As Zizek says, for Heidigger, we wouldn't have Sein without Das Sein.

Zizek goes to great lengths to demonstrate the post-structural condition: that how we read comes before what we read. Borrowing from Karen Barad, we can separate how we read from what we read, because we can use how we read to discover what we read -- or we can use what we read to discover how we read – but we cannot discover their entanglement, that is the border between the two. To paraphrase him, in order to find out how the two go together, we need to realign the objects so that we, the viewing apparatus and the object in question, are tested against a third thing...which is impossible. There is no third point of view, in the theory of relativity. Results always come from the position of the viewing apparatus, as it cannot be outside itself. Philosophically, there's no third view either. We may try to step out of this understanding, out of the metaphysician's realm, but all attempts to determine the root of discourse find themselves mired in the failure to fully explain the framing of that discourse. To put it another way, Zizek notes that antiphilosophy is at the heart of philosophy. With each failure to explain antiphilosophy, we get more philosophy. With this line of reasoning, Zizek, as usual, goes through a huge nest of thinkers to demonstrate how their different philosophies circumambulate various centers of discourse:

The basic motif of antiphilosophy is the assertion of a pure presence (the Real Life of society for Marx, Existence for Kierkegaard, Will for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, etc.) irreducible to and excessive with regard to the network of philosophical concepts or representations. [. . .] The great theme of post-Hegelian antiphilosophy is the excess of the pre-conceptual productivity of Presence over its representation: representation is reduced to the “mirror of representation,” which reflects in a distorted way its productive ground (841).

Of course, Zizek wants to say that Hegel was the first to reach this irreducible ground, as the synthesis of consciousness – and he traces this through a variety of manners that is both entertaining and enlightening. But Barad’s point remains; whatever language Zizek adopts, we see the mysterious Presence continually being shuffled from point to point, which reduces all discourse to a manner of tautology:

The mistake resides in the fact that the limit pertaining to the form itself (to the categories used) is misperceived as a contingent empirical limitation. In the case of cognitivism: it is not that we already have the categorical apparatus necessary to explain consciousness (neuronal process, etc), and our failure to have yet done so pertains only to the empirical limitation of our knowing the relevant facts about the brain; the true limitation lies in the very form of our knowledge, in the very categorical apparatus we are using. In other words, the gap between the form of knowledge and its empirical limitation is inscribed in this form itself (284).

So while we understand the mysterious Real though our a priori categories, these categories give us an incomplete view. In order to mirror ourselves with the exterior, to be "appropriate" to reality, we create a standing social order, a consistency within discourses (or many discourses themselves) each of which approach the mystery of the world from another angle. These discourses are always defractions, which are in themselves incomplete, hinging on one another but only shuffling pure Presence about. Spoken through Fichte: this absence can be expressed as antoss, or as Lacan liked to say about the Self: "I think where I am not." This can be unpacked to mean that the self is simply what mediates itself. In this way, Hegel remains for Zizek the genius that first notices how what we read is how we read:

In this sense, it is meaningless to call Hegel’s philosophy “absolute idealism”: his point is precisely that there is no need for a Third element, the medium or Ground beyond subject and object-substance. We start with objectivity, and the subject is nothing but the self-meditation of objectivity (144, original italics).

Unpacking this thought, lets realize that not only is the self “less than nothing” but “less than nothing” is also the pure Presence mediating the discourse itself. We get the symbolic reality through the loss of pure Presence. Its lack allows us to read through it to get discursive reality as a full blown immersive social environment of culture.

I rather enjoyed this lengthy and inspired book. To be brief, Zizek does philosophy to hide the fact that philosophy no longer works, that in Heidegger’s language, philosophy has been suspended while capitalism contemplates itself. In this sense, capitalism tries to say what reason cannot (in this sense, capitalism occupies the same position as Art for Kant, that of a second nature). No wonder then that Zizek says philosophy stopped with Hegel, that the many guises of Hegel are in fact not-Hegel or a stunted Hegel so that we can continue on with postmodernism, with the avant garde, because we haven't learned Hegel yet... so we hide him away while we continue on in endless jouissance. So to cut to the chase:

In every discourse, in every sense-making, we either sacrifice completeness or we sacrifice contingency. Master discourses (like that of Gods) generally sacrifice contingency to create completeness, to wrap us in universals, to guarantee the universe be stable for us to live in. But in all of these cases (and you can go on ad infinitum), you will end up asking, why is there necessity? As in is there a "necessity particle" that makes existence be (as existence itself is without cause)? Why are things even necessary? Is there pure being somewhere? Zizek’s answer is to locate the split of symbolic reality (necessity) and the Real together within the subject, that only through a split subject do we get contingency as the only necessity. Our ability to understand is then only supplemented through both Reason and an encounter with the Real that stands in to verify the completeness of discursive truth. For Zizek the subject’s being split is another way of saying that necessary to subjectivity is the provision of what needs to be included within its view, of what cannot be compromised. Zizek provides the example where some Christians replied to Darwinism by insisting that the world was 4,000 years old, that fossils were placed in the Earth to test faith. Zizek doesn’t believe this to be true but he cites this example to show that the “grain of truth” in the Christian example is their

impossible-Real objectal counter-part which never positively existed in reality – it emerges through its loss, it is directly created as a fossil. [T]he exclusion of this object is consistitutive of the appearance of reality: since reality (not the Real) is correlative to the subject, it can only constitute itself through the withdrawal from it of the object which “is” the subject [. . .] What breaks up the self-closure of transcendental correlation is thus not the transcendent reality that eludes the subject’s grasp, but the inaccessibility of the object that “is” the subject itself. This is the true “fossil,” the bone that is the spirit, to paraphrase Hegel, and this object is not simply the full objective reality of the subject [. . .] but the non-corporeal, fantasmatic lamella. (645).

This is another way of encountering the symbolic Real, the meaningless floating signifier that would guarantee completeness, that is the subject in its actualization. Be this ontology, money, or joy, fear, anxiety, love, mana or luck, such signifiers often allow discourse to hinge on these terms in order for that discourse to continue to be relevant, a kind of antiphilosophy in the heart of philosophy or antilaw at the heart of law. Zizek writes

Every signifying field thus has to be “sutured” by a supplementary zero-signifier, a “zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains.” This signifier is “a symbol in its pure state”: lacking any determinate meaning, it stands for the presence of meaning and such in contrast to its absence, in a further dialectical twist, the mode of appearance of this supplementary signifier which stands for meaning as such is non-sense [. . .]. Notions like mana thus “represent nothing more or less that floating signifier which is the disability of all finite thought. (585, original italics).

So is there any way to get out? The only meaningful answer is no, as to escape pure Presence is to fall into non-sense, or at least a difference sense that is non-sense from where we current are. Even attempt to transgress the limits of the law end up invoking the law in its transgressed form, simply because those forms are how we understand. This is how the Real becomes mirrored within the symbolic as the pure form of the symbolic. The symbolic Real, which is what Zizek would call meaningless encodings necessary to moor our consistency (our discourse, so to speak), operates through the contingencies qua Real, a maneuver of the subject to mediate itself and actualize.

At this point, to recognize a new thing, like a new world order, or a solution from our capitalist dilemma, means coming to new coordinates, a new phenomenon, a new axis. Zizek locates this between drive and reason, to have the two come together. You can read this like the unification of money with language, but he leaves it open, because after all, these are metaphysical terms. Directly speaking, such terms are always beyond our understanding, lacking substance, even as they are always within the area delineated by our pure understanding, but completely impotent to interrupt our world and realign it. All we need is the right content to come along, the right void to allow us to rename it, and recognize it as the new event, in the language of Nietzsche, "the eternal return." With that, we could have a new epoch, a new pure Presence emerging from nothingness itself, and that new Presence would be a new world order, a new symbolic Real to realign our world, to remake our world. Compared to anything in or current state it would be more than anything, a new nothing from which there would never be any possibility of return as we would irreparably be someone else.

[Diego Navarro · Rating 5 out of 5]

0) Trigger warning: not only this can easily take most of your reading year, but send you into reading a couple more books to cope with it.

1) Nontrivially, Zizek is worth knowing. Less than nothing was quite a surprise for me, who knew him as a buffoonish, self-deprecating political commentator and a slick, overarticulate theoretician seen in fashion catalogs and movies like the Pervert's Guide series. It's a very, very erudite book -- something of a virtuoso display of philosophical knowledge well in excess of the needs of his main arguments. Even as it keeps to a loose "the Hegel in Lacan / the Lacan in Hegel" theme, it builds its theoretical fortress with small stones and launches in a number of preemptive strikes at some of its enemies (everything between Heidegger and Meillassoux and cognitive psychology and Badiou) and remakes others (Kripke, Deleuze, G.K. Chesterton -- of all people) into allies.

2) I have three index cards filled to the edges with cryptic, overcompressed notes on this book, but possibly the key theme which people like me will find at first troublesome but then worth grappling extensively with is the non-psychotherapeutic relevance of Jacques Lacan -- as a reiterative theoretician of dialectics and as an ethicist of nontrivial import and consequence. Critically, this happens at odds with the kind of Heideggerian ethics of authenticity that has marked (sometimes explicitly, sometimes simply in the cultural running water) self-described "post-ideological" politics, existentialism, American pragmatism (as in Hubert Dreyfus) and deconstruction. This deep engagement with Lacan means that everything annoying about it is front and center, from the extensive treatment of sexuation and sexuality (not as metaphors either, as subjects worth understanding as theoretical formalism) to mathemes. But there's a method to this all, and even if you (like me) feel strongly about authenticity as a meta-ethical position in spite of all this, themes like point de caption and the Real are interesting -- maybe more as "design patterns" than as formal computational model, but still.

3) It's easy to dismiss Zizek as a far-away case in the "Sokal continuum" from empirical anthropology to "theory without end". Maybe it's a wise position too, given how much time it has taken me to deal with him. But this is the wager: maybe there's something to "dialectical materialism" that's vibrant and necessary, but underdeveloped in Marx (who alternates exciting Heraclitean fire, leveling 100+years in advance with universal Darwinism à la Denett, and outdated economics and incoherent political strategy); maybe there's something deeper than marketing games about the symbolic (here not in Lacan's restricted sense) manipulation of reality as well, maybe point de caption indeed is a compelling theory of focal points (contra Deleuze's Logic of sense, Meillassouxsian pessimism and Ayache's Blank Swan). It's theory, and to my Deleuzean palate it continues to rest on crystal-fragile philosophical foundations in 18th century speculative idealism. But at some point through reading this it seems to "click" together; and if one's left with Less than nothing on a desert island, one's sure to come out of it a Lacanian. It's a dangerously seductive argument at that, much like certain women can be seductive and dangerous.

4) It's a very big book, a thousand pages and no pictures, and if you're anything like me you'll be stuck with it for many many moons. Plan accordingly.

[Shannon Finck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I made it through, didn't I?

[sphinxfire · Rating 2 out of 5]

Before I read this book I only knew about Zizek from his documentaries, talks he had given and a few short articles of his, but I thought that, as I was getting confident in my understanding of Hegel, it would be informative to build on that and see what perhaps the most prominent Hegelian today might have to add to his thought, or where he might see a way 'beyond' the Hegelian paradigm.

Less Than Nothing starts off strong, it is generally competently written (if a bit bloated), in some places actually intriguing. I imagine that, especially to those not too familiar with Hegel, the graceful dance self-reflective thought dances with itself in the mind of a dialectician on the level of Zizek must appear mesmerising and indicative of both impressive intellect and a deep understanding of the subjectmatter being discussed. However, from the very beginning there are passages that hint at the insanity to come, and as one progresses through LTN these become increasingly prevalent, until they reveal themselves to be the backbone of its central thesis.
The virtualization of the absolute, a rather strange take on the idea of quantum-truth (which, principally, I don't have a problem with) and the political suspension of the ethical are the building-blocks used to create the illusion of a world of infinite possibilities, where all truths appear to be already overcome, pre-emptively sublated. Zizek then asks his readers to make the leap out of the present, a leap he himself admits can not be rationally justified . . . which is precisely the opposite of the Hegelian position, which recognizes that the future must emerge out of the present with the force of necessity (though one can only recognize it as such after the fact), not by an arbitrary choice to reject the present for the sake of an unspecified, totally unknown alternative.

Wait. This world is a false world and we just need to let go and kill the present so the future can manifest itself? We're going to have a new society? A new man? Why do I get the feeling that I've heard all that somewhere before?

[Maxim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent! The book contains a new way of reading texts by Hegel and Lacan. But not just that, lots of important issues which should be staged again in philosophical thinking. So how I felt during my harsh reading time? It should be read in a feminist way: "brain pussification"...

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Žižek is trying to formulate a new political ontology, one that combines Žižek's preferred elements from Hegel, Marx and Jacques Lacan. As I am not familiar enough with these people's writings to know one way or the other whether Žižek properly represents them, I don't focus too much on the accuracy of his representations of philosophers writings and what they meant.

I do, however, enjoy and benefit from the whirlwind tour of philosophers that Žižek often engages with. Cutting through his Hegel/Marx/Lacan argument are engagements with Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Freud, Foucault, Butler, Badiou and many others. These moments of engagement are usually meant to sustain Žižek's own arguments, I don't know how many responses he is going to get from the few living philosophers he engages in.

In fact, as I read this 1000 page behemoth I wondered how many people would actually engage with Žižek on the level that he is trying to engage them. Žižek's writing has an affective quality to it, it sensually engages those of us who enjoy labyrinthian tours of people and ideas, but I can't see many people (1) reading it and (2) doing much with it after they have read it.

For myself, there are certain moments I will go back to and further engage with. Žižek always gets my attention with certain parts of his thinking (ontology, capitalist critique, subjectivity, conditions of revolution), but this book proves a pretty good rule when dealing with Žižek: stick to his shorter books. Thankfully, the book doesn't have as tight of a structure as Žižek's introduction would lead you to believe, so you could view each chapter as it's own book. Though there are some developments and back-references you might miss, I don't think this would severely detract from benefiting from reading Žižek.

What benefit does this book have? If you are interested in Continental Philosophy (mainly German/French idealism/existentialism) and especially subjectivity and ontology, you will find much to spark some thoughts here. I don't recommend reading Žižek with the goal of trying to understand everything he says. I most benefit from reading Žižek when I think through the problems that he raises with many philosophical concepts and practices and apply that to my own thinking. If you aren't interested in at least some of the subjects and people I have mentioned in this review. I don't recommend this book. If you are interested in Žižek, I recommend reading any of his other books, but especially his shorter ones.

[Kai Mustakoski · Rating 5 out of 5]

LESS THAN NO-THING

By Swami non-Slavoj Object-a-žek

”That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.”, Wittgenstein was wrong, precisely because that whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain in constant contingent inconsistent deluge of speak, words and clauses in never-ending anthropomorphic möbiusband-ourobours-lemniscate forged in the compulsive process of relentless word production that loses itself, necessarily, in itself, and to the very debated - in-itself. Cogito Lego (™) Sum - I play (well); therefore, I am.

Žižek’s Less Than Nothing’s gravitational fall will probably collapse your quantum wave length to kudos like speechless awe - or cause you to go over Jouissance where the prediction is pain.

Furthermore, Hegel this and Lacan that, Heidegger there, Alan Buddy-O here, Fichte and Kant on the wall, Nietzsche’s shadow, Kierkegaard leaps, Democritus in his Den, Lenin & Stalin’s non-colloquial materialism, chit-chat, Hitchcock’s vertigo, 1000 pages of western style Advaita Vedanta.
And I loved it - what a challenge to wrestle way above your weight class!

In other words, subjectivity has to objectify subjectivity and lose itself in(-)itself to even appear/know; thus, Wittgenstein was wrong again: In the beginning of the anthropomorphic space there was the ”word”: Although, it is - precisely - debatable.

Overall, a very interesting book, I did read it for the sheer challenge and scope of it, and to get some new ideas, and, boy, I sure did.

And I could stand here and lie that I did not understand it all - but for the sake of the truth - I (non)-did! ($).

(p.s. Regards and respect to Cadell Last for inspiring me to read this book. I highly recommend his youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCtC...)

5/5

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 1 out of 5]

On occasion I spend some time with the commonplace. Some years ago having correlated Zizek with incorrigible stupidity and breathtakingly unoriginal pedestrian academia by way of spending much money to appear in poverty, I thought there might be something to a thousand-page book on Hegel from the idiot's philosopher of slobbering, pedantic nonsense. Something apart from the fifteen years of fame allotted to ever generation's upheld, unoriginal, jester of spectacularity. I expected less than nothing from Less Than Nothing, and was astonished to see how quickly my expectations were met(!) when right from the get-go we learn that this is the author's 'Hegel for Imbeciles.' Now the book could have been Hegel for imbeciles without actually saying so, of course; but when it's a part of the modus operandi, the fool's popularity reminds one of the summit of self-loathing retardation in vogue among the profane masses, who read this sort of contemptible nonsense for no other reason than at the rate of $50,000 per year, it is not so much that Zizek can't be wrong, but that one's parents' money Kant be wrong. Deplorable. A shithole of a book,.

[José L B Carvalho · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eu queria parafrasear um comentário sobre o livro que acredito ser extremamente pertinente.

Em tradução livre:

"...Sei que descrever qualquer livro de Zizek como "o seu mais coerente" é como parabenizar uma performance do Bob Dylan por ser a sua performance "menos nasal..."

E de fato isso é um problema. Zizek é um dos autores mais frustrantes de se estudar dentro da filosofia crítica justamente por sua excessiva incoerência e desorganização intelectual. Muitas das obras que tive contato sempre se apresentaram como uma espécie de ensaio de jornal, cujo autor apenas arranhava ou esboçava uma tese (Que acredito que na maioria dos casos, não suportaria ser sustentada por muito tempo) e recorria a floreios ou obscurantismo para levantar suposta complexidade.

Mas se há algo do Zizek que merece uma atenção especial, é esse livro. Provavelmente sua obra mais sistemática, organizada e extremamente erudita. Esse livro me tomou bons meses de leitura, e me levou pra vários outros campos de conhecimento que eu não estava muito habituado. De fato não é o tipo de obra que eu recomendaria como introdutória e está longe de ser algo acessível sem que se tenha o mínimo repertório que o autor propõe elaborar.

[Alexandru · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most challenging books I've read. Zizek's style is rather chaotic, jumping from one concept to another, which is characteristic of him. It certainly helps if, before reading the book, you read Hegel, which is not easy as well. In fact, you have to read a lot of philosophy to be able to navigate through the concepts analysed in the book successfully. A titanic work from Zizek and a difficult read.

[Clinton Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps Zizek's introduction of this topic, in first explaining how "nothing" is a type of "something" and that, therefore, the concept of "less than nothing" is possible, might remind one of the wearisome formulation at the beginning of Black Sabbath's record, "13": "is this the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end". That said, in describing Plato's "Statesman", in which Zizek explains that the positivity of the word (concept? persona?) "barbarian" is that it serves as a container for everything that is not a "Greek", Zizek describes this as what sets the dialectical process in motion as a way of approaching Hegel-something must always be a "no-part" of the predominant "thing" being considered, thereby unleashing a sort of (for lack of a better way of putting it, at least on my part) "matter/anti-matter" duality that allows the posing of something against not its opposite but its "not-thing". Again, it's probably easier for most to understand something like this by simply asking themselves a question: do we fit where we are? Is something about life and its "predominant shadow", the "idea" that creates an invisible set of rules to conform to, seeming to not "hold" what we are? Are we ourselves "the part of no-part"? The opposition that starts a dialectic.

"Less Than Nothing" is a critique of the master order (in Zizek's mind, neoliberal capitalism and its unchallenged assumptions) that's tucked inside a rather dense philosophical consideration of Hegel. In fact, the densest part of the book from the point of view of tracking different philosophers' development of (and permutations considering) the concept of what "less than nothing" is or could be...the fact that a positive concept of "nothing" as being the "not-something" automatically means that, with "nothing" being a positive, tangible, existing "thing", there then must be a "less than nothing", right?...is the second-fourth, and the book loses its way in there. But the book puts forth what I believe its central hypothesis is most strongly in its third-fourth; namely, that usually in life we make mistakes and that our first move to do something is usually the wrong thing, and its through the reactions to these wrong things that eventually enables the decision of the "right thing", such as it is. Another central concept is the sort of shadowy order that neoliberal capitalism has become; how does one exist in the shadows of it as a "not-part-of-it" rather than collaborate?

That said, one might say, did he need more than 1000 pages to come to that central point? Well, yes, in that the amassing of the cultural and philosophical supports, the girders, for this view of the world is quite important. The idea that there is, embedded in film, literature, marketplaces, a sort of yet-undeclared "order" that subsumes other orders cannot be put forth without quantifying those orders, and also what sorts of commentary on them has been put forth by philosophers to date. Presumably, other reviewers of this book have concentrated on Zizek's ruminations on the philosophers; his penchant for interrupting long, dense inquiries with dirty jokes; and so on. But what ended up resonating for me was the central point: that coming up with a sort of "impossible dream" or lost cause that militates against the "master signifier" and its tentacles throughout all the branches of the neoliberal society is maybe the only life plan worth adhering to. But how?

A great book.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I finished this in April 2021 according to the logs. Then, I picked it back up again later in the year (or early 2022) because I felt like it needed a more thorough going over, since I read it without fully comprehending everything the first time; I had also run out of Zizek, Badiou, and Jodi Dean to read and felt more ready the second time since I believed I had fully grasped Zizek’s “edifice”. This time I paid much closer attention and gave it a much closer reading - through the Parmenides I believed I had it, then the Fichtean chapter finally started making sense and when I got to the Hegel section I followed it precisely, never just “understanding” it, but “conceptually comprehending” it. As soon as I finished the Hegel section I was alight with the holy spirit and felt I could actually return to the source and read Hegel-himself. I started the journey through Phenomenology of Spirit into Science of Logic along way the way not going near Zizek to try and grasp the content on my own grounds (not yet realizing that Zizek was those grounds). I finished Phenomenology at some point then got started on Science of Logic still avoiding zizek; in fact, forgetting Zizek altogether while on my journey. With Science of Logic I’d refer to different translations and other interpretations to help here and there, even using Lenin’s philosophical notebooks as an aid at times.

First review:
So a thousand pages to prove and conclude that we need a communist type Party with a leader to direct humanity out of inevitable catastrophe ... thanks Zizek! Love you bro

[Marius Croeser · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't often plug another authors book -- however, Zizek's 'Less Than Nothing' will go down as the philosophical work of this decade.

We will forgive Zizek when he classifies each of us (rather correctly..?) as either idiot, imbecile or moron. We will overlook his participation in the Cult of Nothingness. As all dogma should be mistrusted we will overlook his participation in the 200 year-old philosophical foolishness after scientific dogma (note, Zizek's incorporation of the Higgs into his philosophy).

However, capitalism enables our fetishizing of objects and along with postmodernism obscures our symbiotic relationships (the most basic relationship at the heart of the capitalism system is wage-labor or is it slave labor?). If his project, that is to force the re-evaluation of our own beliefs, is successful -- then we will be indebted to Zizek.

Personally, because ALL future philosophical publications will need to take on board Zizek's 1010 page edifice, I have also delayed my next book.

Find my THE MEANING OF YOUR LIFE - Secular Help' here: http://www.amazon.com/THE-MEANING-YOU...

Find Zizek's 'Less Than Nothing' here: http://www.amazon.com/Less-Than-Nothi...

[James Kozubek · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like reading Zizek, and this book is entertaining, and he is an outstanding social critic. However, I am going to give it a 3 stars because I think of Zizek as a sort of egomaniac. I also have legitimate issues with Hegel, and dialectic materialism. First, it never really seems to take into account neurobiology, and what we know about innate forms of justice being hardwired (for instance, an innate sense of justice being appropriate to the context, fair and proportional) which are things we know innately and which are not explicitly cultural. The second thing is that much of these theories put the individual identity in context of certain cultural or social arrangements, whereas you could have a strong identity and have a minimal to limited interest in politics or social dynamics; for instance, people who are more individualistic, not bad people but just do not engage much in social justice one way or another. Third, it is often hard to see how much of what Zizek translates into practical solutions, and he rarely offers any such solutions or guidance, and he himself often defaults to the position that maybe capitalism has succeeded. Often when he gives talks he hedges so much that you come away wondering what he believes in at all, or if it devolves into nihilism. I recommend his debate with John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, which is a more serious book.

[Valentín Serrano García · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tras leer las introducciones a Hegel de Víctor Gómez Pin y de Rafael Aragues, y tras haber acabado esta magna opus, no me cabe duda de que es imperativo y necesario leer (saber leer) a Zizek.

No voy a volver a repetir lo que ya comenté en otras reseñas en goodreads acerca de Zizek; ahí están para quien quiera echarles un vistazo.

Aunque el recorrido, a través de más de mil páginas, es frenético y polifacético, a veces denso, otras abigarrado de riqueza conceptual y, otras, enigmático, las reflexiones son siempre sugerentes. Si bien Zizek repite, aquí y allá, discursos ya hilados previamente (he podido saltarme algunas partes por eso mismo), nunca llueve sobre mojado en lo que se repite para poder ser mejor pensado.

Por supuesto, no recomendaría este libro a quien no esté suficiente familiarizado con el freudolacanianismo o, a rasgos generales, con el pensamiento zizekiano. La profundidad de este pensamiento merece mucho trayecto previo y, sobre todo, mucha valentía para no retroceder ante el abismo de la subjetividad.

En cualquier caso, una buenísima introducción a Hegel, quizás mejor que Zizek -aunque en su línea- sea Emancipation after Hegel (Todd Mcgowan)

[Ivane · Rating 5 out of 5]

"beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction"

I stumbled upon a phrase, "beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction".
That felt fun and interesting to me.
I found out the phrase was from this book. So I bought it.
The book delivered on fun-and-interesting part promised by the phrase.
So, if you enjoyed the phrase, probably you will enjoy the book too.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author defines what I grasped as a high school student who experienced 'The Trial' by film maker Orson Welles.
(1) "If we are to overcome the 'effective' social power, we have to frist break its fantasmatic hold on us." p. 689
(2) "'Transversing the fantasy' does not mean going outside reality, but 'vacillating' it, accepting its inconsistent non-All." p. 689

[Phillip]

curious

[Antonio Ruiz Capilla · Rating 2 out of 5]

Prefiero pensar que no lo entendí.

[Martin Hare Michno · Rating 4 out of 5]

now that I've finished this, I'm quitting goodreads because this is a terrible website that barely functions and I'm heading over to storygraph

[Knecht René · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the masterpiece of Žižek. The one you can always return to. Each time you open it, you find details so finely woven and illuminating Žižek’s other books and sometimes, of course, it works the other way around.

When I first read the book, I was most fascinated by the sections on Fichte, that was my entry point, and I still find it one of the most interesting parts. Later, “Objects, Objects Everywhere” became another favorite. But as you evolve with the book, “Correlationism and Its Discontents” grows in depth and resonance. I keep discovering new things each time I return to it.

Note: Schelling doesn't appear so much in LTN and is also one the highlights in Zizek's oeuvre (The Indivisible Remainder and The Abys of Freedom which sparked my interest in Fichte too).

For me, the absolute highlight comes around pages 400–401, where Žižek reaches a kind of culmination point: what the "subject" truly is in Hegel = the moment when the subject becomes the passive observer, when the object itself has been completely abrogated/ aufgehoben, but in a second-order sense, as a “sublation of sublation". What remains is released back into nature, liberates the object, is dropped/let go (in Hegel's language).

The passive subject, as observer, can't want no longer manipulate the object, it no longer wants to. The object becomes pure potential. It’s like saying to someone, “You are my teacher”. You don’t want to change them anymore: you recognize him/her as a 'singular' point. Perhaps this is the most fundamental form of Eros.

==> No Cause-Effect, only Casa Sui, the real core of the Master Signifier/ Lacan's 'Le trait unair'. Where the Subject becomes an Abstract, Pure Contraction (Schelling), goes through the "Night of the World" (Hegel's madness), a Singularity which is a Potentiality.

==> Subject has no more predicates, absolute individuation, desubstantialized (Substance becomes Subject), Vanishing Point, Less Than Nothing, The Zero Level.

Or Subject is a marble (Hofstadter), a hallucination, a rainbow you try to touch, Spirit is Bone (Hegel), Transcendental Object (I = Inaccessible thing, Kant), I = Processual thing (Fichte's Tat-Handlüng, appearing-to-itself)

==> A hallucination, 'hallucinated' by an 'hallucination".

The difference with Ideology (spurious infinity), vulgar/bad science becomes clear.
The real meaning of Hegel's Absolute Knowing and abstracting (Tearing apart, Defecation, Excrements, ..)

The preceding chapter - Interlude 2: “Cogito in the History of Madness” - is the preparation where Žižek revisits how Derrida and Foucault debated madness as either inside or outside reason, and how this links back to Descartes. It goes very deep.

In this sense, Žižek may be more Heidegger than Heidegger himself, or more Lacan than Lacan himself? (TBD)

One could say, yes, we’ve already read these ideas elsewhere in other of Zizek's works, but here, you truly feel them. I personally love the repetition, the twists, the examples.

And of course: once you think you've grabbed the basic idea, there comes the counter/twist, the parallax view: that reality itself is split/thwarted ... and can only be experienced in its antinomies .... (which is probably better explained in other books). Nevertheless you can see the seeds of it in LTN (Less than Nothing). With so many pages and detours, you only catch glimpses of it from time to time, yet those glimpses are worth the time reading the entire book in parts.

This Parallax view/Split is not an illusion to be overcome but the structure of the Real itself. The gap is not something to be healed: it is what makes Truth possible. Truth = the GAP.

Thus, when Hegel’s Logic “releases itself as nature ”, it does not close the circle: it performs the paradox that defines existence.

Žižek’s Hegel is not the philosopher of total synthesis, but of eternal incompletion: the system that holds precisely because it never fully closes. The Absolute Idea is not rest, but motion, not peace, but the awareness of the constitutive antagonism that keeps thought alive.

Note: There is no Universal "Abstract universality" (ideological thinking) but only a "Concrete universality" (= the difference which is universal, a misfit/out-of-joint shows us the possibility of something Universal).

To “let go” then, is not to abandon the dialectic, but to embody it: to live with the parallax, to accept the cut as the very pulse of being. That is Žižek’s great lesson and his real meaning of 'Dialectic Materialism' (this is not the version of the classical textbook versions).

And all of this is very well documented with references which are also an inspiration to read other authors.

That Platonic idea in Hegel, that the copy of the copy can be more real than the original, remains one of the most breathtaking insights in all philosophy.

[Ali Jones Alkazemi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is like a tragic work: With parallel confrontations of the different philosophical problems that poses themselves in our time, the book's end provides a final formula of how we are
to structure our lives if we are to overcome the current political, epistemological and social antagonisms of our time. It is therefore more a book comparable to Hegel's phenomenology than a book that exclusively discusses Hegel's philosophy: The book stands as a whole system of how we are to understand the posed symptoms of our time.
Besides being a work important to our contemporary dilemmas, it is also a discussion of the history of philosophy up to our time: The discussion about Plato, Schelling, Badiou, Marx and Fichte (which I found hauntingly good in relation to his discussion of Freud and Lacan, though not emphasized thoroughly as it could) is the product of a deep philosophical investigation. — If one is not politically engaged, the book should anyway be read in relation to these discussions.
Zizek is normally a figure who has the appearance of being a fun cultural critic in various ways, but in this book he appears in a new guise: He is a thinker who has invested enormous effort in analysing every aspect of our thinking and, successfully, formulated a way of thinking that grasps every contour of our daily life, from romantic love, to politics and metaphysics/religion. The formulated philosophical system of this book is then something of which the reader can take with him in his future-coming engagement. — This 1000+ page long work will therefore be of great use in the time to come, both in the private and public sphere of my behaviour.

[DeleuzePilled · Rating 5 out of 5]

.....Wow

Where to begin? Can you 'begin' with a work like this?

This work is difficult to describe. It is an erratic and scatter brained tome with multiple spelling and grammar errors (verso's fault), references and stories are reused multiple times, at a few points is non-sensical, it is somewhat bloated, and I absolutely loved it.

To me, this work was an amazing explication of other philosophers and pop culture through Hegel-Lacan tinted glasses. Not really Zizek's personal philosophy (I've read the Parallax View is the work for that). A great way to end the year.

As I rise from the ashes a new being after finishing this beast, I have decided in 2025 I will put a major focus on Hegel, Marx and Lacan. These 3 thinkers are too important to not wrestle your whole life with. Time for some Aufhebung.

[wakeupf*ck · Rating 1 out of 5]

Eser sadece felsefe değil, siyaset, sinema, kültür ve ideolojik alanları kapsayacak şekilde çok katmanlı. O kadar katmanlı ki okumakta bazen çok zorlandım. Yazar Lacan’ın özne kuramı ile Hegel’in felsefesini birleştirip yorumlamış. Zizek’e göre özne, anlamın merkezine yerleşen bir boşluktur; kendini sürekli yeniden inşa etmek zorunda olan bir eksikliktir. Gerçeklik, ideolojik olarak yapılandırılmıştır. Gerçek asla tam olarak temsil edilemez ve her zaman eksiktir. Bu eksiklik, varoluşun motorudur. Özetle anlatmaya çalıştığı şey; Gerçek, hiçbir zaman tümüyle temsil edilemez; çünkü öznenin kendisi, zaten bir eksiklik olarak var olur. Biz sadece bu boşluğun çevresinde döneriz. Kitap sadece Hegel’in karmaşık sistemini değil, aynı zamanda çağdaş dünyanın çelişkilerine değinip derin felsefeler yapıyor. Bana çok hitap etmedi yazım dilinden ötürü bu kadar karmaşık şeylerin bu kadar ağır bir dille anlatılmasına gerek yok diyalektik düşünceler, hegel bunlar zaten yeterince soyut ve karmaşık düşünsel süreçlere dayanıyor. Sadece hegelin diyalektiğinin yanlış anlaşıldığını ve aslında hegelin asıl yönteminin çelişkiyi çözmek değil, içselleştirmek ve onunla yaşamayı öğrenmek olduğunu savunduğu kısmı sevdim.

[Madison Delaney · Rating 4 out of 5]

An immense book full of tidbits. Zizek's at times roundabout, provocative prose can be frustrating at times, in particular when arriving at a clear answer feels elusive, but it manages to maintain interest for a book that seems wordier than the bible.
It deals with a variety of topics, ranging from popular culture and politics through to emerging trends in post-continental philosophy at the time, psychoanalysis, Hegelian studies, ontology, and metaphysics more broadly. His proposed relation of the subjective and objective is interesting, even if I don't buy it.
I recommend this book above almost all others as a look into Zizek the thinker, moreso than Zizek the provocateur.