Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

First published by Verso 2012

Slavoj iek

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

eISBN-13: 978-1-84467-902-7

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

iek, Slavoj.

Less than nothing : Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism / by Slavoj iek.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-84467-897-6 -- ISBN 978-1-84467-889-1 (ebook)

1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. I. Title.

B2948.Z55 2012

193--dc23

2011050465

Typeset in Minion Pro by MJ Gavan, Cornwall, UK

Printed by in the US by Maple Vail

To Alenka and Mladenbecause die Partei hat immer Recht.

Contents

Introduction: Eppur Si Muove

There are two opposed types of stupidity. The first is the (occasionally) hyper-intelligent subject who just doesnt get it, who understands a situation logically, but simply misses its hidden contextual rules. For example, when I first visited New York, a waiter at a caf asked me: How was your day? Mistaking the phrase for a genuine question, I answered him truthfully (I am dead tired, jet-lagged, stressed out ), and he looked at me as if I were a complete idiot and he was right: this kind of stupidity is precisely that of an idiot. Alan Turing was an exemplary idiot: a man of extraordinary intelligence, but a proto-psychotic unable to process implicit contextual rules. In literature, one cannot avoid recalling Jaroslav Haeks good soldier vejk, who, when he saw soldiers shooting from their trenches at the enemy soldiers, ran into no-mans land and started to shout: Stop shooting, there are people on the other side! The arch-model of this idiocy is, however, the nave child from Andersens tale who publicly exclaims that the emperor is nakedthereby missing the point that, as Alphonse Allais put it, we are all naked beneath our clothes.

The second and opposite figure of stupidity is that of the moron: the stupidity of those who fully identify with common sense, who fully stand for the big Other of appearances. In the long series of figures beginning with the Chorus in Greek tragedywhich plays the role of canned laughter or crying, always ready to comment on the action with some common wisdomone should mention at least the stupid common-sense partners of the great detectives: Sherlock Holmess Watson, Hercule Poirots Hastings These figures are there not only to serve as a contrast to and thus make more visible the detectives grandeur; they are indispensable for the detectives work. In one of the novels, Poirot explains to Hastings his role: immersed in his common sense, Hastings reacts to the crime scene the way the murderer who wanted to erase the traces of his act expected the public to react, and it is only in this way, by including in his analysis the expected reaction of the common-sense big Other, that the detective can solve the crime.

But does this opposition cover the entire field? Where, for instance, are we to put Franz Kafka, whose greatness resides (among other things) in his unique ability to present idiocy as something entirely normal and conventional? (Recall the extravagantly idiotic reasoning in the long debate between the priest and Josef K. which follows the parable Before the Law.) For this third position, we need look no further than the Wikipedia entry for imbecile: Imbecile is a term for moderate to severe mental retardation, as well as for a type of criminal. It arises from the Latin word imbecillus , meaning weak, or weak-minded. Imbecile was once applied to people with an IQ of 2650, between moron (IQ of 5170) and idiot (IQ 025). So it is not too bad: beneath a moron, but ahead of an idiotthe situation is catastrophic, but not serious, as (who else?) an Austrian imbecile would have put it. Problems begin with the question: where does the root becile preceded by the negation (im-) come from? Although the origins are murky, it is probably derived from the Latin baculum (stick, walking stick, staff), so an imbecile is someone walking around without the help of a stick. One can bring some clarity and logic into the issue if one conceives of the stick on which we all, as speaking beings, have to lean, as language, the symbolic order, that is, what Lacan calls the big Other. In this case, the tripartite idiot-imbecile-moron makes sense: the idiot is simply alone, outside the big Other, the moron is within it (dwelling in language in a stupid way), while the imbecile is in between the twoaware of the need for the big Other, but not relying on it, distrusting it, something like the way the Slovene punk group Laibach defined their relationship towards God (and referring to the words on a dollar bill In God we trust): Like Americans, we believe in God, but unlike Americans, we dont trust him. In Lacanese, an imbecile is aware that the big Other does not exist, that it is inconsistent, barred. So if, measured by the IQ scale, the moron appears brighter than the imbecile, he is too bright for his own good (as reactionary morons, but not imbeciles, like to say about intellectuals). Among the philosophers, the late Wittgenstein is an imbecile par excellence , obsessively dealing with variations of the question of the big Other: is there an agency which guarantees the consistency of our speech? Can we reach certainty about the rules of our speech?

Does not Lacan aim at the same position of the (im)becile when he concludes his Vers un signifiant nouveau with: I am only relatively stupidthat is to say, I am as stupid as all peopleperhaps because I got a little bit enlightened? One should read this relativization of stupiditynot totally stupidin the strict sense of non-All: the point is not that Lacan has some specific insights which make him not entirely stupid. There is nothing in Lacan which is not stupid, no exception to stupidity, so that what makes him not totally stupid is only the very inconsistency of his stupidity . The name of this stupidity in which all people participate is, of course, the big Other. In a conversation with Edgar Snow in the early 1970s, Mao Zedong characterized himself as a hairless monk with an umbrella. Holding an umbrella hints at the separation from heaven, and, in Chinese, the character for hair also designates law and heaven, so that what Mao is saying is thatin Lacanesehe is subtracted from the dimension of the big Other, the heavenly order which regulates the normal run of things. What makes this self-designation paradoxical is that Mao still designates himself as a monk (a monk is usually perceived as someone who, precisely, dedicates his life to heaven)so how can one be a monk subtracted from heaven? This imbecility is the core of the subjective position of a radical revolutionary (and of the analyst).

The present book is thus neither The Complete Idiots Guide to Hegel , nor is it yet another university textbook on Hegel (which would be for morons, of course); it is something like The Imbeciles Guide to Hegel Hegel for those whose IQ is somewhere close to their bodily temperature (in Celsius), as the insult goes. But only something like it: the problem with imbeciles is that none of us, as ordinary speakers, knows what the im negates: we know what imbecile means, but we dont know what becile iswe simply suspect that it must somehow be the opposite of imbecile. But what if, here too, persists the mysterious tendency for antonyms (such as heimlich and unheimlich about which Freud wrote a famous short text) to mean the same thing? What if becile is the same as imbecile, only with an additional twist? In our daily use, becile does not stand on its own, it functions as a negation of imbecile, so that, insofar as imbecile already is a negation of a kind, becile must be a negation of negationbut, and this is crucial, this double negation does not bring us back to some primordial positivity. If an imbecile is one who lacks a substantial basis in the big Other, a becile redoubles the lack, transposing it into the Other itself. The becile is a not-imbecile, aware that if he is an imbecile, God himself also has to be one.