The Hegelian Death-Drive

Thursday was Hegelian Death-Drive day at Birkbeck (ho-hum) and the incipient sense was that we are now starting to touch-upon the philosophical core of Zizek's project. Opening with a video clip from Vertigo (cue inevitable technical incompetence - as Avital Ronell once put it, "I am a philosopher of technology! I don't know anything about how to actually make it work!") Zizek moved to repeat his analysis of the split-subjectivity of Madeline-Judy from Organs without Bodies.

"Do you like the fantasy I project onto you"











When Scottie first encounters Madeline, Hitchcock presents to the viewer a luminous profile of Kim Novak - Madeline as the ideal woman. The crucial point here, though, is that this profile is not framed according to Scottie's point of view - rather it amounts to a kind of inner vision, a "subjectification without subject." This is the Lacanian understanding of fantasy - this is to say, the Lacanian understanding of fantasy is that fantasy is always in some sense never exactly my fantasy, but rather something beyond me, and in excess to me.

The spectral double (the "negative") of the Madeline profile shot is the "dark Judy" shot that Hitchcock presents later in the film. This shot testifies to the crucial point about Lacanian fantasy - namely that it always ultimately fails. Vertigo is thus not a film - as some feminist critics have claimed - about the (sexual) objectification of woman by (patriarchal) man, but rather a film about the deadlock that sexual objectification ultimately encounters, the failure of sexual objectification - and the birth of the subject as the result of this failure.

"I started hanging out with the undead"

The subject emerges from the collapse of fantasy - as in the fall from paradise. But what precisely is this subject, what does it amount it - and specifically, what does it amount to as an ethical agent? As Zizek understands it, turning around Althusser, the question equates to a kind of practical - and not just theoretical - anti-humanism. This, for the reason that the essence of the human must be acknowledged as properly inhuman - this is to say, desire. Desire is traumatic, anxious, dangerous - it is situated beyond the pleasure principle, and for this reason even the mere spectre of it serves to threaten our entire libidinal economy. How can we deal we desire? If there is hope, it lies in Hegel.

"Mr. Big Other"

There is a certain image of Hegel, claimed Zizek - Hegel as this kind of ridiculous Mr. Big Other figure, with his end of history, his absolute knowledge, his concrete universality, his cunning of reason. But the truth of these concepts is in fact almost diametrically the reverse of their conventional understandings. As Owen Hatherley has already noted, contra Fukuyama, the end of history does not mean that we - fortunate, wise us - have now finally come to the end of a marvellous, progressive journey through the ages. Rather, it means that in fact every point in history presents itself precisely as the end of history - or, as Walter Benjamin put it, "This state of emergency in which we live is not the exception, but the rule."

Similarly, absolute knowledge is not this idea that, once upon a time, a man named Hegel, sitting at his desk in Jena came upon the objective truth of all existence - no, it means instead that from the perspective of any perspective whatever, knowledge always immediately presents itself at absolute and total - such is the simulacrum that it manufactures of itself. But, as Deleuze might put it, in representation (and after all, what really is absolute knowledge except the representation of representation?) we see only answers - and incomplete answers at that, and if we want to really understand something, what we need to see the problem that has produced such an answer. "And this," said Zizek, as he pulled a rabbit from a hat, "is precisely what Hegel meant by concrete universality! And the cunning of reason - this is not the idea that beneath all blind contingency there is really this secret objective necessity, it is the opposite - subtending all apparently rational necessity was originally nothing more than blind contingency!"

History to a Girl

The fact remains, Zizek said - we are entirely determined by the past. But the crucial point is, though this is true, it is also true that how precisely we define the past to a certain extent depends on us, and specifically the option is open to us to insert new possibilities into the past - new possibilities that functioning beyond-themselves succeed in opening up new possibilities in the present. As Badiou-Macmillan would put it, "Events, dear boy, events..."