Žižek's Hegelian-Lacanian Reading of the Subject

Abstract

For Zizek, considering Hegel's philosophy as the culmination of absolute systematization and idealism which ultimately dissolves the diversity of reality into absolute idea and knowledge, is a cursory judgment of his philosophy. Zizek argues it is possible to remove the stains of absolutistic perception from Hegel's thought by using Lacan. Accordingly, Zizek’s reading of Hegel's subject, unlike his predecessor and contemporary thinkers, takes place in the space of Lacanian concepts and the context of the real. In this respect, the Hegelian subject is not a pre-predicative thing and it doesn’t have a priori coherence, but it is always bounded by the conditions of the external occurrence. The existence of the subject is the product of an abstract totalitarian negation that challenges the authoritarian and totalitarian structure of the substantial order. Lacan's excuse for rereading Hegel is not because Zizek assumes Hegel is trapped in a kind of semantic and structural self-referential subjugation. Rather, he always identifies a kind of surplus in Hegel's philosophy of spirit which can only be analyzed by using Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts. Zizek takes Hegel's dialectic from the level of the logic of the signifier, in which desire is recognized through the other and the subject is digested as the subject of a sign in the symbolic order, to the level of Lacan's logic in which there is no big and perfect other. It is always incomplete, barred, and not-all structured around a fundamental lack. According to Zizek, there is the real in the subject which is not impossible, and a desire does not fit in the framework of the production of fantasy, signifier and big other, and this is exactly the point where the subject is formed.

Keywords

• zizek
• lacan
• hegel
• the other
• the real