Slavoj Žižek - Tarrying with the Negative

Tarrying with the Negative

Post-Contemporary Interventions

Series Editors:

Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson

Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. G. W. F. Hegel, "Preface" to Phenomenology of Spirit

Tarrying with the Negative

This maintaining of a distance with regard to the Master-Signifier characterizes the basic attitude of philosophy. It is no accident that Lacan, in his Seminar on Transference, refers to Socrates, "the first philosopher," as the paradigm of the analyst: in Plato's Symposium, Socrates refuses to be identified with agalma, the hidden treasure in himself, with the unknown ingredient responsible for the Master's charisma, and persists in the void filled out by agalma. It is against this background that we have to locate the "amazement" that marks the origins of philosophy: philosophy begins the moment we do not simply accept what exists as given ("It's like that!", "Law is law!", etc.), but raise the question of how is what we encounter as actual also possible. What characterizes philosophy is this "step back" from actuality into possibilitythe attitude best rendered by Adorno's and Horkheimer's motto quoted by Fredric Jameson: "Not Italy itself is given here, but the proof that it exists."3 Nothing is more antiphilosophical than the well-known anecdote about Diogenes the cynic who, when confronted with the Eleatic proofs of the nonexistence and inherent impossibility of movement, answered by simply standing up and taking a walk. (As Hegel points out, the standard version of this anecdote passes over in silence its denouement: Diogenes soundly thrashed his pupil who applauded the Master's gesture, punishing him for accepting the reference to a pretheoretical factum brutum as a proof.) Theory involves the power to abstract from our starting point in order to reconstruct it subsequently on the basis of its presuppositions, its transcendental "conditions of possibility"theory as such, by definition, requires the suspension of the Master-Signifier.

In this precise sense, Rodolphe Gasche is fully justified in claiming that Derrida remains thoroughly a "transcendental" philosopher: notions like differance, supplement, etc., endeavor to provide an answer to the question of the "conditions of possibility" of the philosophical discourse.4 That is to say, the strategy of the Derridean "deconstruction" is not to dilute philosophical stringency in the unrestrained playfulness of "writing," but to undermine the philosophical procedure by means of its most rigorous selfapplication: its aim is to demonstrate that the "condition of impossibility" of a philosophical system (i.e., what, within the horizon of this system, appears as the hindrance to be surmounted, the secondary moment to be subdued) actually functions as its inherent condition of possibility (there is no pure logos without writing, no origin without its supplement, etc.). And why should we not also claim for Lacan the title of "transcendental philosopher"? Is not his entire work an endeavor to answer the question of how desire is possible? Does he not offer a kind of "critique of pure desire," of the pure faculty of desiring?5 Me not all his fundamental concepts so many keys to the enigma of desire? Desire is constituted by "symbolic castration," the original loss of the Thing; the void of this loss is filled out by objet petit a, the fantasy-object; this loss occurs on account of our being "embedded" in the symbolic universe which derails the "natural" circuit of our needs; etc., etc.

This thesis that Lacan is essentially a philosopher seems nonetheless all too hazardous, since it blatantly contradicts Lacan's repeated statements which explicitly dismiss philosophy as a version of the "discourse of the Master."6 Did Lacan not emphasize again and again the radically antiphilosophical character of his teaching, up to the pathetic "Je m'insurge contre la philosophic" from the last years of his life? However, things get complicated the moment we recall that it is already the post-Hegelian philosophy itself which, in its three main branches (analytical philosophy, phenomenology, Marxism), conceives of itself as "antiphilosophy," "notanymore-philosophy." In his German Ideology, Marx mockingly observes that philosophy relates to "actual life" as masturbation to sexual act; the positivist tradition claims to replace philosophy (metaphysics) with the scientific analysis of concepts; the Heideggerian phenomenologists endeavor to "pass through philosophy" toward the post-philosophical "thought." In short, what is today practiced as "philosophy" are precisely different attempts to "deconstruct" something rete "red to as the classical philosophical corpus ("metaphysics," "logocentrism," etc.). One is therefore tempted to risk the hypothesis that what Lacan's "antiphilosophy" opposes is this very philosophy qua antiphilosophy: what if Lacan's own theoretical practice involves a kind of return to philosophy?