[D66] 'Long Live the Dialectic', Long Live the Nothing

[Antid Oto]

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1164-long-live-the-dialectic-long-live-the-nothing
'Long Live the Dialectic', Long Live the Nothing
By Matthew Cole / 29 October 2012

Steven Connor, in the Times Literary Supplement, sums up the major 
importance of Slavoj Žižek's ''everlasting gobstopper of a book" Less 
Than Nothing. In a single paragraph, Connor explains Hegel's 
Phenomenology of Spirit as the 'engorgement' of Spirit through the 
dialectical movement of history (spirit meets its negative antagonist in 
the form of matter or the material world and responds by both preserving 
and overcoming both thesis and antithesis through the process of 
sublation), the principle of the postmodernist reaction to it 
(denouncing the Hegelian dialectic as one of several totalising 
conceptions of the world that it rejects) and finally Žižek's critical 
thrust that manages to:

both discredit postmodernist arguments in their dependence on a dishing 
of Hegel, and to endorse the objections to totality that are key to 
those postmodernist arguments.


For Žižek, History is not about a teleological progress toward the 
absolute consolidation of Spirit, but rather about its self-division or 
“the inherent self-distancing of the One itself”. The Spirit, or rather 
Subject, does not precede negation nor does it undergo some process of 
negation from a coherent whole. Rather, as Connor sums up, “oneness is 
plucked out retroactively from a primary condition of division”. He 
calls this kind of operation 'boot-strapping', referencing the idiomatic 
American mythology of 'pulling oneself over a fence by one's 
bootstraps'–an absurdly impossible action. Of course, this is precisely 
the type of adynaton that Žižek champions, for they are the driving 
principle of history and politics as “every authentic act creates its 
own conditions of possibility”. This means that the revolutionary 
impulse does not result from some naïve historical scientism, but 
rather, nothing, so that “each stage 'rewrites the past' and 
retroactively de-legitimizes the previous one”. Furthermore, the 
retroactive revolutionary form is determined not from the present, but 
from the future: “each historical form is a totality which encompasses 
not only its retroactively posited past, but also its own future, a 
future which is by definition never realized”. Hence Less Than Nothing 
is the excess of negation, which extends into the future.



It is in this sense that perhaps we can understand why Žižek, Badiou, 
and others construct a philosophy that attempts to break with history, 
whilst remaining within this world. The insistence on “the possibility 
of the impossible”—in Badiou's case the event that comes from the void, 
and for Žižek the aufheben from less than nothing (the future)—along 
with the rejection of History (capital H for its totalizing status, big 
Other, etc.) comes from an acknowledgement of the failure of the old 
communist projects, a militant refusal to capitulate to capital, and 
finally the desperate hope for something radically new.

In Less Than Nothing as well as his newest offering The Year of Dreaming 
Dangerously, Žižek, as noted by Benjamin Kunkel in the New Statesman, 
remains resolute in his stance that “capitalism can't be reformed.” 
There is nothing redeemable or savable in the present or the past, 
including political parties, Keynesianism, etc. Furthermore as Kunkel 
summarises:

Žižek sees in various popular discontents the chauvinist misprision, the 
consumerist absence, the communalist disguise or the anti-capitalist 
incipience of his own politics. Radical politics at its most basic 
consists of two elements: strategy and programme or how to get power and 
what to do with it. Žižek's programme is straightforward: the 
replacement of capitalism by communism.

However he makes a critical point that

the time is past for the left to content itself with the blank 
proposition that another world is possible. What traits, other than its 
otherness, would such a world possess? As liberal capitalism saps its 
ecological foundations, defaults on its economic promises and forfeits 
its political legitimacy, another world is becoming inevitable. Which 
one do we want? And can we make this one into that one before it's too late?

These questions remain open. Perhaps the future might provide us with 
answers.


Visit the New Statesman to read Benjamin Kunkel's review in full.

Steven Connor's review can be found in this month's Times Literary 
Suppliment.