Sex and the Failed Absolute, Zizek (*)

Last updated on 11 Sep 2022.

Review and notes on Sex and the Failed Absolute, Slavoj Zizek

Introduction: The Unorientable Space of Dialectical Materialism

• When belief in an Absolute fails, a hedonistic pseudo-Absolute is instantiated in its place.
• Sexuality is inconsistent, and this its evalation into the new Absolute fails.
• Schelling: the female orgasm is the high point of human evolution.
• Sloterdijk: the experience of the orgasm is ontological proof of god - we come into closest contact with the Absolute.
• Intense sexual act as the most intense unity of Being is wrong; we need to focus on how sexuality is constituted by antagonisms.
• This book - concerned with exploring large metaphysical questions without regressing to premodern sexualized understandings.
• Topology - a structure which is unorientable has no consistent definitions of direction.
  • Mobius strip
  • Cross cap
  • Klein bottle
• The theoretical space of dialectical materialism is unorientable; it caves in upon itself.
  • Language here is reminiscent of Baudrillard’s quasi-topological descriptions of the curvature and shape of the hyperreal.
• Why refer to dialectical materialism? An unorientable dialectical materialism is very different from Stalin’s DM.
  • Hegel - change takes place when we notice it has already taken place
  • Progress is always localized; we observe circularity generally
• Ontological parallax. Parallax - the displacement of an object caused by a change in observational position. Philosophical: the observed difference is not simply subjective; subject and object are mediated, such that an epistemological shift in the subject’s view always results in an ontological shift in the object itself.
  • Similar to Heidegger’s ontological difference; the ontological dimension cannot be collapsed into the ontic singular.
• Unorientables enables us to investigate what materialism really is.
  • We need to disassociate materialism with matter; but rather materialism without matter, in the material of waves and quanta in a dematerialized space.
• True materialism implies the disappearance of matter in a network of relations. The movmeent of the abstract immaterial should be conevied as entirely contingent, purposeless, and non-spiritual.

“ideas are stupid, a mind embodied in a ‘material’ living being is needed to combine them in a purposeful way.”

• Materialism should be deprived of evolutionary progressivism or determinism; evolutionary materialism is the ‘worst idealism’.
• Evolutionary optimism is simply not true.
• A dialectical analysis helps us detect subterranean tensions and invert///subvert the continuity of progress.
• Dialectical materialism: *depth is an effect of convoluted surface.
• Theorems of the book.
  1. We should not be tempted by new materialist ontologies; every ontology fails and reality thwarts itself, this subversion understood in the parallax gap between the ontic and the transcendental.
  2. One can step behind the parallax gap by transposing it onto the thing itself; this redoubling happens in the place of sexuality as our contact with the Absolute. Sexuality is the force of negativity which disrupts every ontological platform.
  3. Explores the convoluted topology of reality.
  4. The negative which grounds our reason cannot be taken into account by realist ontoloiges; the dimneison of subjectivity is irreducible.
• The enemy of this book is not new realist ontologis but alluring non-thinking.

Theorem I: The Parallax of Ontology

Not only our experinece of reality, but also this reality itself is traversed by a parallax gap: the co-existence of two dimensions, realist and transcendental, which cannot be united in the same global ontological edifice.

• Absolute Knowing - Hegel’s version of contact with the Absolute

Modalities of the Absolute

• Can humans contact the Absolute?
• Scale: Absolute as ultimate substantial reality \(\iff\) Absolute as pure appearance
• Beauty is an Absolute - there is more truth in appearance than what is hidden behind it. (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation)
• Plato and Christianity are anti-Wisdom; the Absolute appears in fleeting experiences rather than modernist depths-beneath-the-surfaces.
• The Absolute is easily corroded.
• German idealism - subject and object coincide.
• Materialist Marxist - social totality of practice is the ultimate horizon of determining meaning.
  • The Nazis were not wrong because it presents Jews in the wrong light, but is ‘absolutely’ false becuase it obfuscates the antagonism of the social totality by projecting an internal cause onto an external intruder. Historical materialists reject the possibility of objective self-views.
• The solution to what separates us from the Absolute is not to overcome the gap but to transpose the difference onto the Absolute.
  • Disparity between subject and object is simultaneously the disparity of the object with itself.
  • The epistemological ignorance of the subject is also the epistemological ignorance of the object.
  • Christianity: the alienation of man from god is projected onto god itself. (Christ falls from God: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”; god is abandoned by himself.)
• Christian Marxism - Marxism without Christianity is too idealist; only a link to Christianity makes Marxism truly materialist.
• Absolute Knowing - the violent twist through which we realize that our ignorance is at the same instant the ignorance in the Other itself.**
• If objective reality is all there is, how should it be structured so subjectivity emerges out of it? how can we reconcile the ontic and transcendental realities?
• How can we describe the pre-ontic and pre-ontological structure of objective reality, which comes through transcendental constitution? We must describe the things which are ‘less than nothing’
• Hegel’s absolute recoil: a substantial entity emerges through recoil; a retroactive effect of its divisions.
  • Words retroactively create the silence it disturbs.
• Bootstrapping - pulling one up by one’s hair - is impossible, but it is the feature which defines spirit; there is no spirit without matter.
• We cannot say that our reality is an imperfect approximation of a full spirital entity because this failure of realizing spirit is intrinsic to the material domain: spirit emerges through the failure of the material domain to fully render it.
• Meillassoux - transposes the contingency of our perception of reality into reality; this is subtly different from redoubled lack. It is caught in the middle; the problem appears retroactively as its own solution. Asserts the cognitive accessibility of reality in itself. Facticity is a basic ontological feature of reality itself.
• Hegel overcomes Kant’s agnosticism; Kant’s epistemological limitation is ransposed onto ontological impossibility; things in themselves are marked by ontological incompleteness.
• Meillassoux - primary properties must be capable of being formalized in mathematical terms conceived as properties of the object in itself; mathematics becomes the syntax of objective ontology. Builds the difference into the ontology of reality.
• What if we do not ontologize the negative, but instead conceive of a subvrsion of every ontology such that every conception of an objective reality becomes irreducibly normative? The only non-normative fact is he gap of impossibility itself.

Reality and its Transcendental Supplement

• Philosophy switches between the transcendental (what is the universal structure of reality’s appearance?) and the ontic (what is the universe itself?).
• Heidegger was the ‘climax without decline’ of transcendentalism; the natural sciences ‘kidnapped’ the ontic.
• Hawking declared that philosophy was dead. However science is wrapped in the hermeneutic circle; the space it discovers is constrained by itself. It is itself a philosophical system.
• Reality deprived of the transcendental is inconsistent. Consider the nuclear button; a tiny part of reality which holds it all together.
• The search for the overlapping between the transcendental and the real is a primary topic of German idealism.
• Scientific realism is the contemporary hegemonic view.
• How does the transcendental dimension arise in the real (ontic)?
• Deontological dimension: the ought/is differentiation
• Is the transcendental a repressed image of reality?
• Any attempts to overcome the bridge between the ontic and the transcendental is labelled an opponent of Reason.
  • Some evolutionary positivists attempt to provide an evolutionary account of transcendentalism.
• Foucault - the empirico-transcendental doublet. Empirically, we are part of nature, but transcendentally, we are part of the symbolic praxis horizon.
• Reality fails to be what it is; “its facticity is traversed by its impossibility”. In this way it is similar to the Absolute.
• The transcendental is often considered to be subjective, but today transcendentalist positions also present themselves as anti-subjectivist.
  • Structuralism - transcendentalism without subject (Levi-Strauss)
• The structuralist thesis - one cannot think outside of the symbolic order; once it establishes itself, we cannot think outside of structuralist terms (it is ‘always already’ here), and only tell myths and narratives about the genesis and world before this symbolic order.
  • It is not like the symbolic order suddenly emerges itself, but that it was always already here because there is no way to relate about time which is not in its term.
  • Althusser remains transcendental even in his theory of subjectivity as an illusory effect of ideology
  • Derrida’s always-already: the Fall is a violent cut of Difference which disturbs eternal peace, but which too makes for all that preceded it a retrospective illusion
  • Hegelian response: the always-already does not suffice: the question is not “what is nature for language”, but “what is language for nature”? What does the rise of the Subject do for the pre-subject Substance? When we discover a new untouched tribe, how are we the Other? This allows us to slide beneath the transcendental.
  • In quantum physics, the real is formed in the moment before the collapse; the real is the becoming of the real.
  • Sexual difference - the real is not the difference between the masculine and the feminine but the difference in becoming, the process, the journey.
• Inversion of teleologism: anti-evolution, ex-aptation - organs lose function and become useless, and triggers a new symbolic order: order emerges out of a retroactive chaos.
  • Stephen Jay Gould - speculates human speech emerges from the malfunction of throat muscles in humanoid apes.
  • Marx: the anatomy of man as key to the anatomy of the ape as a subversion of teleological evolutionism.
• Obet a: the subject’s impossible-real objectal counterpart, which is the imagined object which never existed reality; it retroactively emerges through its loss; absolute recoil.
• Object-oriented ontology is also transcendental: grounded in a disclosure of reality: relies upon an anthropomorphic return to the premodern mystic world.
• Derrida’s deconstruction: ‘there is nothing outside the text’. ontological claims are always-already caught in the transcendental dimension of writing. Or, external reality is already made in a structuralist/textual fabric, the ontology of reality.

Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism

• Distrust of Western Marxism is growing among radical leftist theories: Western Marxism has lost contact with the global revolution.
  • From the perspective of western Marxism, it is thrid word radicalism which has lost contact with Marxism.
• Lukacs - revolutionary theory is itself a form of practice.
• Marxist history is always itself practical - changes the object into revolutionary subject. Truth is only possible in an engaged position.
  • Sandra Harding, standpoint epistemology: an inverse ontological claim. Changes the oppressed subject into object, ‘strong objectivity’.
• The gap that separates the ontic from the transcendental is unbridgeable (?)
• Labor is reified, science is reified: they perceive themselves as the knowledge of reality the way it is itself, without its mediation with subjectivity.
• Lukacs - every objective state of things is already mediated by subjectivity. Every objectification is reification.
• The proletarian revolution is also characterized by the gap between the universal, transcendental assertion of freedom and the following new conditions of exploitation.
• Naive realism is premodern, Renaissance thinking
• Other Western Marxists attempt to break out of the transcendental circle:
  • Bloch - teleology is part of nature itself. Returns to premodern utopian cosmology.
  • Ilyenkov - cosmology of the spirit, development of reality from elementary atomics into different forms of life; if reality is spatially and temporally without limits, then there is overall no progress, since everything has always already happened, and thus every development is circular. Anti-teleological stance. Quite speculative cosmological position.
  • Sade - there is nothing wrong with violence as it conforms to the violence of the universe. Yet there is no such nature which is ontologically consistent: nature is already itself destabilized by antagonisms. Total negation has always-laready happened.
  • Althusser - structural Marxism
  • Adorno - how to reconcile materialism’s prioritization of the objective and the idealist notion of subjective mediation of all objective reality? everything we experience as directly given is already mediated; every theory which asserts our access to direct reality is therefore false. However it is not true that all objective content is produced by the subjective either, which fetishizes subjectivity into immediacy.
• Today’s science - capitalism needs science as the foundation of economic productivity, but also wants to keep the foundations of society free from science. We now have a need for ‘state philosophers; neo-Kantians fulfill this role.
• Stances towards ontology are always political positions.

The Margin of Radical Uncertainty

• Paradox of the postmodern rejection of a consistent Self - we end up with a set of contingent subjective consturctions. A materialist instead refuses to accept objective reality to subvert consist subjectivity.
• Every notion of objective reality is bound to a subjective point. Any physicist knows this; your calculations for the velocity of an object vary depending on your reference frame.
• How are things in themselves?
• Lacan’s basic materialism is occasionally accompanied with agonisticism - who knows? Even if god really exists, our belief in him is still an illusion. Religion is a fake even if it is true.
• Lacan’s margin of radical uncertainty
• Where do we look at for the real to break out of our circle of subjectivity?
• The only accessible real is the excess of our subjectivity.
• Subject never fits reality; it is the crack in the ontological edifice.
• The transcendental dimension is noto nly an effect of failed ontology, but that the failure of ontology is inscribed in the very inconsistent form of the transcendental.
• Steps:

1. The transcendental is incomplete, just as the real is incomplete, both as a product of failed ontologies.
2. We gain access to the in-itself by identifying our deficiency with the deficiency that is within reality itself. This is the overlap between the reality and the transcendental, the overlap.
3. The deficiency is sexuality (Lacan and Freud). Sex is the human point of breaking with nature: we confront our ontological incompleteness and find pleasure in the means as more of an end than the end itself.
4. Sexuality can be expanded as a function of reality: how has reality become structured to allow for the enchantment of sexual defifiency?
   • The boomerang is the first properly sexual and therefore human instrument.

Corollary 1: Intellectual Intuition and Intellectus Archetypus - Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel

Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel

• Intellectual intuition - free flow of awareness in which opposites collide.
• Kant - if we were able to directly access the in-itself, we would not be able to have the spontaneity, the aleatoric matrix, which constitutes transcendental freedom.
  • Our freedom exists in between the phenomenal and the noumenal. This is Hegelian Real, whereas Kantian Real is the noumenal thing in and of itself. There is a fear that closing this gap deprives us of ethics.
• Difference between subjective appearance and “real” appearance.
• What is the problem of Kant? The pure positivity of Being is transposed onto the inaccessible noumenal reality. The Hegelian redress: transpose the absolute gap which separates us from the noumenal Absolute into the Absolute itself.
• The Kantian gap is already the solution; a limitation which is its own solution (pharmakon) - Being itself is incomplete, it is complete in its incompleteness.
• When Derrida deconstructs Roussea, the deconstruction is already in Rousseau’s writing. This is a necessity: Derrida can only deploy a deconstruction through this blindness.

From Intellectus Ectypus to Intellectus Archetypus

• Kant - intellectus archetypus. Possibility/contingency is a property of our finitude rather than of reality.

Scholium 1.1: Buddha, Kant, Husserl

• Husserl asserts the phenomenological reduction: existence involved in experience.
• All of reality is captured in the phenomenological epoche, but the positing of the subject changes: we no longer situate ourselves as insertions into an ‘out-there’ exterior world, but rather it is in the here: some part of the phenomenal flow - the ‘true appearance’ - is what we experience as the objective reality.
• How do we deal with the parallax view between the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ (scientific) readings of experience? The Buddhist subjective position of anatman asserts that self-reflection is reflection of a self from a self-less being.
• Subjectivity emerges through the questioning of the interpellating call of the Other. What is desubjectivization? It occurs upon immediate glance as something perverse: as positing oneself directly as an instrument of the Other, an appendage without any individuation. “Let things be as they are”; “accept death if you are called to it”.
  • Partial study in the sciences seems to engage in ‘perverse desubjectivization’ of this sort.
• Husserl’s eidetic reduction: take an empirical object and compute the aleatoric matrix.
• The contradiction of the psychological-empirical subject: one who thinks oneself simultaneously embedded within reality and an autonomous agent.
• Marx’s concept of alienation is the ultimate ahistoricity, something which is out of the reach of phenomenological perspective. Alienation is an essential dimension across history.

Scholium 1.2: Hegel’s Parallax

• “Absolute Knowing”: the abandonment of the subjective agent, the “thought without a thinker”
  • Extendable perhaps to Baudrillard’s “copy without an original”, “product without a producer”
• The pure activity must coincide with the human vehicle: the idealism collides with practice.
• What is an indeterminate decision?
• “Authentic philosophy is a kind of ‘theoretical psychoanalysis’”; it is an existential decision.
• Hegel’s thought as the gap between Logic and Phenomenology.
• The cross-cap: a structure which appears to be a consistent standard object, with an inside and an outside - but which is traversed by an intraversable gap, one inside it.
• The gap is the ‘inside’: it is necessarily inconsistent, by nature, tautologically even.
• Radical dialectical skepticism is the way to get at acquired knowledge, the properly Hegelian way. The crown of thinking is to transpose ultimate negativity into existing knowledge. The ‘sacrifice of creativity’ is the true sacrifice of sacrifice.

Scholium 1.3: The “Death of Truth”

• Many people claim that truth is dead: we form echo chambers, we censor the alternative facts, fundamentalisms which disavow rational thought are gaining traction. And the caricature of deconstruction and nihilism certainly contribute to this conception too.
• The Holocaust was, as a matter of truth, false - wrong, bad, flawed. Even if a compelling narative is put fort which suggests that industry is dominated by Jews. The most efficient lies are those which operate under unquestioned axiomatic truth, such as in statistics. Yet this is put in service of a lie. The standpoint of Nazism is false.
  • It is not relativist to suggest that human history is always told from a certain standpoint; but some are more true than others. Some capture the dynamics of social totality more completely than others.
• Those that wax nostalgic for a truthw hich once prevailed are wistful for a time of ideological hegemony: the distintegration of the big-T Truth into local truths is the fragmentation of ruling ideological hegemony.
• “Better injustice than disorder”
• Universality and partiality/particularity do not exclude each other: they complement each other.

Theorem 2: Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute.

The only way for us, humans, caught in the parallax gap, to break out of it is through the experience of sexuality which, in its very failure to reach its goal, enables us to touch the dimension of the Absolute.

• Lacan’s formulas of sexuation have a congruent structure with Kant’s antimonies of pure reason: Lacan’s formulas are antimonies of pure sexuation.
• Kant’s antimonies: applying transcendental reasoning to the noumenal yields irresolvable antimonies.
• The mathematical antimonies concern immanent nature: dynamic antimonies concern the exception to the universal order. And for Lacan, the masculine is defined as universality and the feminine is constitutive exception. This occurs in symbolic constitution: the universality needs the exception. If there is no exception, the order is non-all. “Exception makes the rule”.
• The impossible can only be inscribed through failure: it is a purely negative thing, it is the sublime.
• Jouissance - excessive enjoyment, beyond self-interest and the pleasure-principle. Freud - death drive.
• Sexual passion inserts a violent cut into our daily life. Sex is a great competitor, a basic experience of metaphysical experience.
• Sexuality describes immanent antagonism.
• Sexual enjoyment is not only destined to fail, but also an enjoyment of failure.
• Rythmic repetition is a certain form of eroticization.
• The noumenal sexual thing can only be reached through a Kantian sublime: negatively painted through failure.
• In the sexual calculus, the erotic is a close stone’s throw from the ridiculous: the desublimated observer sees the sexual act as a bit ridiculous.
• Man is universal - “am I really a man?” Woman is exception - “I am woman, but do not limit me as such.” Thus sexual difference is a second-order differential: it is a difference between two modes of difference.
• Object-oriented ontology: subject is one of the objects.
• What is reality ultimately composed of? Reality is not-One: the impossibility of being One is the immanent precondition.
• The assertion of self-identity is an assertion of difference itself: the difference which cuts across a thing.
• The shift from Kant to Hegel: from epistemological antagonisms to antagonisms immanent to reality. Not a pre-critical metaphysics. We include subjective distortions into objective processes. It is not that subjective antimonies simply reflect.
• Sex is accessible only as the always-missed point. Sexuality inscribes itself within the cuts and gaps of the symbolic.
• Sexuality is ontologically relevant beyond traditional precritical oppositions - yin/yang, light/dark, etc.
• The One exists out of its own impossibility; One is contingently actualized.
• “forgive them, for they know not what they do” - the aleatoric contingent matrix of reality. Conspiracy assumes ultimate power. God is a puzzle for even himself.
• Sexuality is the gap filled in by fantasy.
• A decision always retroactively posits its own reasons - politics can never be settled through rational debate. Politics is unified by the immanent gap and impossibility which constitutes it.
• Copulation cannot stand by itself: it needs partial drives.
• There is never just two but \(1 + 1 + a\); the third element is difference as such. Kierkegaard - all people are officers, maids, or chimney weeps. Sexual difference as real. The formula for sexuation is not M/F but M/F/+.
  • There is no class antagonism without a third term - materialization of the antagonistic difference itself.
• Sexual difference is entirely internal to the Symbolic’s immanet point of impossibility. Balzac: two naked children (a boy, a girl). One asks, “but how will we know who is the boy and who is the girl?”. We are naked only under our own dress. The difference acquires meaning through symbolic status. All perception is mediated through the symbolic universe.
• Substance to Subject: looking for a substantial essence behind the veil of appearances to realizing that there is nothing behind it and what is put there is what it has already put there; the nothing is positive; the void which is subject.
• From Plato: \(\neg\) everything is appearance; but rather that essence is appearance as appearance: the gap between appearance and essence is transposed into appearance itself. Being, Essence, Appearance - another Hegelian triad.
• The limit which separates the infinite from the finite is immanent to the finite: an this infinite may just be this limit.
• The paradox of qdifferential calculus: teh relationship remains even though quantity is reduced to zero
• What divides the sexes is not its relative difference but its difference from itself; its immanent antagonism. Lacan: the only signifier of sexual difference is \(S_1\): the feminine position is that of excess. Excess/surplus/+ precedes the thing with which with respect to it is a surplus/excess.
  • We obtain such relationships because we are not dealing with self-identical terms but rather with identity and difference: the excess is difference as such.
  • Man is the only gender and woman is the first figure of transgender.
• With Lacan, the structure is marred by a fundamental axiomatic imbalance, asymmetry: “a short-circuit between the universal andt eh particular”; sexual difference is the difference which defines the human sexuation itself.
• Particularity does not prove universality, but it fills the gap in it; masculine universality and feminine particularity.
• The excess, the negative container, the signifier which demonstrates the lack of the signified:
  • God embodies our ignorance of causality.
  • Flogiston
  • “Asiatic mode of production”
  • “post-industrial society”
• Man is not-woman, but woman is not not-man: woman’s radical negativity is more intense.
• Traumatic loss of the subject is positive: but when this positivity itself is claimed, then the subject is deprived of loss itself as a structuring force.
• The feminine subject logically precedes the male subject as its moment of constitution.
• “Absolute knowing”: not knowing everything, but placing not-knowing as a feature of knowing itself. Reality is incomplete, ontologically thwarted, unstable.
• Absolute knowing is subjectively mediated, but it is not expressive of the subject’s inner truth - this is instead reproduced by knowledge which reproduces objective facts.
• The Freudian unconscious has the structure of a Kierkegaardian apostle - it is the witness of a truth which is deeply impersonal, an organic body kidnapped by truth, an inscribing surface, a vector of transmission.
• Sexuality is derailed from the beginning, not only in animals but in vegetation.
• Human sexuality is not the exception to nature, but the point in which sexual impossibility appears as such.
  • Animals simply don’t know
  • Humans know they don’t know
  • Infantile sexuality - the search for what cannot be known.
• Technology is liberation through terror.
• Lacan - Two is never Two but One and its void.
• To be religious, god must be a masturbator, spilling cosmic sperms wandering anti-teleologically throughout space, forming living organisms through contingent hookups.
• Passage is not only progression but also failure.
• The Singularity - man overcoming the constitutive failure. We lose our subjectivity and distance from the external. Most of our achievements are rooted in our limitations. When we remove obstacle, we lose what it is an obstacle to.
• Marx’s fundamental mistake: a higher social order is possible. But what is missed is that the condition of impossibility is itself the condition of possibility; to remove the contradictions of capitalism is to remove productivity; Marxian Communism is a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself.
• Posthuman singularity - when we wave away our limitation from the Absolute we lose the Absolute itself.
• We must accept that ‘human nature’ is changing, and open ourselves up to the contingency of change.
• Five steps in the evolution of sexuality:
  1. asexual reproduction
  2. sexual difference posited in itself
  3. sexual difference posited for itself
  4. sexual difference redoubled in the symbolic order
  5. disintegration of both levels; asexual reproduction cancels sexuality

Corollary 2: Sinuosities of Sexualized Time

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