If I look at a real world object, I can only create a representation on my head based on my perception of space (colors, shapes, etc.). I myself came here with a similar crisis: įirst of all thank you, your explanation was very clear and orderly. I'm not sure if that helps, but if you look further into those two concepts, I can assure you that it'll make more sense. class antagonism, sexual difference, there is no Big Other).īasically, by pure negativity, ontological incompleteness, self-limitation, inconsistency, he kind of means the same thing: contradiction, lack, antagonism. And it is by grasping those gaps that emancipation is possible (e.g. It is in reaching contradiction that the subject realises that reality is also inconsistent, antagonistic. noumena) with the contradictory nature of subjectivity (lack, unconscious, the Real). Zizek is aligning here that contradictory nature of reality (phenomena vs. non-human nature - it is by understanding how one exploits the other to extract a surplus that we can understand capitalism's functioning). Against Kant, who critiqued reason for running into contradiction, Hegel thinks that it is when we reach contradiction that we reach the truth (think of the internal contradictions of capitalism: production vs. In grasping that recalcitrant contradiction, we grasp reality.Ģ) Contradiction: For Hegel, the power of 'reason' is to reach 'contradiction'. It's not that the noumenal is out there and the subject can only reach the phenomenal (Kant), but that the very gap between both is that thanks to which we can speak of reality (Hegel). Hence, Zizek explains that reality has an internal limit, which is the very gap between phenomena and noumena. True infinite: Against the finite, which has an external limit (imagine a straight line with an external obstacle), and the bad infinite, which has no limit (imagine an infinite straight line), there is the true infinite, which has an internal limit (imagine a circle). The way I understand this is via Hegel's concepts of the true infinite and contradiction. I think I am myself still getting my head around this. Be patient here, once this makes sense, a lot of gates open. So is it from this passage of Hegel's radicalization of Kant that the concept of void used by Lacan and Zizek is based?Ĭan you help me understand this passage? And more generally the switch from Kant to Hegel. In other words, the subject’s freedom can be ontologically grounded only in the ontological incompleteness of reality itself. The key conclusion to be drawn from this self‐limitation of phenomena is that it is strictly correlative to subjectivity: there is a (transcendental) subject only as correlative to the inconsistency, self‐limitation, or, more radically, “ontological incompleteness,” of phenomenal reality. Aren't the idealists who say that the phenomenon coincides with the noumenon because there is always a subject that looks at it and creates both? But in doing so, it “limits itself”: it admits that, since noumena are transcendent, never to be an object of possible experience, it cannot legitimately treat them as positive objects.The only solution is that the limitation of phenomena is not external but internal, in other words that the field of phenomena is in itself never “all,” complete, a consistent Whole. Our understanding first posits noumena as the external limit of “sensibility” (that is, of the phenomenal world, objects of possible experience): it posits another domain of objects, inaccessible to us. But how? Like: if I am looking a real world object, how phenomena limits itself? So this means that the phenomena limits itself. But next:īut is there not another that of the pure negativity, that is the self‐limitation of phenomena as such, as opposed to their limitation by another positive transcendent domain? True, we can read these lines as: there is an endless field of positive things out there, which can never become objects of our experience, so we can refer to them only in a negative way. So, Zizek is talking about Kant's phenomena and noumena: Hello everyone, in this post I am referring to chapter five of 'less than nothing' titled "Parataxis: Figures of Dialectical Process" (around page 282/283 of the English edition I think).
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