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Between Schelling and Marx: The Hegel of

Slavoj Žižek
A Review of Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical
Materialism by Slavoj Žižek

Giorgio Cesarale
Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
giorgio.cesarale@unive.it

Abstract

In Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek
presents the results of his long meditation on the meaning and ultimate implications
of Hegelian philosophy. In this review-article, I will first examine the stages of
Žižek’s transformation of Hegelianism, and then analyse the main themes brought
up in Less than Nothing. The development of a ‘polemological’ interpretation of the
Hegelian concepts of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘absolute’ leads Žižek to emphasise the role
of negativity and antagonism in the process of constitution of reality and subject as
part of reality itself. This implies a reinterpretation of dialectical materialism: reality is
not something that simply precedes the subject, but which contains just multiplicities
of multiplicities, and thus the Void itself. Žižek’s assertion that the ultimate reality
is the Void itself then renders unavoidable the critique of Hegelian Marxism based
on the centrality of the category of alienation. The last part of the review-article
surveys, instead, how Žižek’s re-reading of Hegel affects his relation with Marx and
also examines the role played by ‘contradiction’ in his theoretical proposal.

Keywords

dialectics – Žižek – Marx – Hegel – subjectivity – Jameson – contradiction

Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism,
London: Verso, 2012

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In many intellectual circles it has become customary to lament the ‘obsession’

of Western Marxism with ‘method’, with the separation of the programmatic
and formal determinations of theory from those of ‘content’. This complaint is
often motivated by quite relevant concerns: if the method Marxism adopts
is dialectics, dialectics rules out the possibility of a separation between form
and content. If the contrary occurs and the discussion on method continues
to be prioritised over that on contents, it is only because Marxism has become
a ‘philosophical’ affair or, less crudely, a theory where philosophy has usurped
centre stage from the critique of political economy.1 Thus one distortion – the
modification of the correct relation between method and contents – is added
to another – and the critique of political economy no longer fulfils the role of
regina scientiarum.
However, missing from this scenario are the reasons why such ‘distortions’
affect Western Marxism. These reasons remain obscure because what is also
obscure is the conceptual determination of dialectics already noted2 by Hegel
and later fully recovered even in some quarters of Western Marxism: namely,
its self-reflectivity and necessary self-reference. Indeed, is it possible to think
of a dialectic that escapes the rigour of its own operations? No, it is not. As
Sartre argued, if dialectical reason is identified and defined by non-dialectical
processes, as in Engels, then it ceases to be dialectical.3 For it to meet its own
expectations, dialectics must be ‘dialectical’, which is to say, it must not ‘reify’,
it must not turn into a rigid and inalterable set of theoretical propositions, and
to avoid doing so it must remain sensitive to the prod of its ‘negative’ and to
instances arising from all non-dialectical or explicitly anti-dialectical thought.
This need to return the dialectical to dialectics has been defended by
Fredric Jameson, not least in his Valences of the Dialectic,4 but so has the
re-development of dialectics carried out by Slavoj Žižek in Less than Nothing:
Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Our claim is that this
book responds precisely to this need. As will soon be demonstrated, Žižek’s
struggle to defend the ‘polemological’ nature of Hegel’s reconciliation is linked
precisely to the belief that negativity (another name for ‘dialecticity’) must
be inscribed in what appears first and foremost as external, and, rather than
extinguished in a ‘synthesis’ that is ultimately indifferent to otherness, it must
be invested in what is posited as the finite product of its process.

1  This is, notoriously, the opinion of Anderson 1976, pp. 49–53.

2  The Logic, the unfolding of dialectical reason at its purest level, results in self-reflection (the
absolute idea) where dialectics becomes its own object.
3  See Sartre 2004, pp. 30–1.
4  See the first chapter, ‘The Three Names of the Dialectic’.

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But prior to Less than Nothing, Žižek published a wealth of reflections on the
fundamental role of Hegelian philosophy. For this reason, before embarking
on a close review of this work, we are going to present a genealogy of Žižek’s
position on Hegel. Then, after expounding the main thesis of Less than Nothing
and confronting it with Fredric Jameson’s most recent revisiting of dialectics, we
will be in a position to consider two questions that traverse Žižek’s theoretical
system, i.e. his reading of the Marxian process of valorisation and his notion of
‘contradiction’. This will eventually lead to an assessment of Žižek’s success in
reconstructing dialectical materialism ab imis fundamentis.

The Prehistory of Less than Nothing: From the Sublime to the

Critique of Alienation

Less than Nothing represents a moment of particular density in Žižek’s

twenty-odd years of meditations on the ultimate meaning and implications
of Hegelian philosophy. The main intuitions of The Sublime Object of Ideology,
later recovered and developed especially in Tarrying with the Negative and The
Ticklish Subject, find their fullest exposition in Less than Nothing. But what was
Žižek’s starting point when, in The Sublime Object of Ideology and earlier still in
Le plus sublime des hystériques: Hegel passé, he asserted the need to retrace the
trajectory of German Idealism that leads from Kant’s transcendental philosophy
to Hegel’s ‘objective idealism’? His starting point was the nexus between the
experience of the sublime and the process of constitution of subjectivity: for
Kant, the sublime is the object whose impossible representation leads us to
overcome the separation, outlined in the Critique of Pure Reason, between the
objects of experience and the thing-in-itself. This failure of representation to
determine the sublime – because the sublime is precisely that object whose
content cannot be contained in any form of the sensible – forces aesthetic
judgement to refer the imagination to reason and ideas, rather than to the
intellect and concepts. Therefore, the sublime is also the object through which,
albeit always inadequately, the ideas of reason are presented. For the first time
in Kant, here, in the world of phenomena, the gap between the noumenal and
the phenomenal closes, albeit negatively, thanks to the very impossibility for
the object to fully present the ideas of reason. Žižek claims that Hegel simply
pushed to its logical conclusion the conceptual framework Kant had set up
around the notion of the sublime, and with this claim he positions himself
in that tradition of thinkers, from Jean-François Lyotard to Jameson,5 which
revalorised the conceptual potential of the sublime. In fact, contrary to the

5  See Lyotard 1984, pp. 77–80, and Jameson 1992, pp. 32–8.

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claims of some vulgate, Hegel’s aim is not to gain direct access to the thing-
in-itself nor rejoin the phenomenal with the noumenal, but to declare that the
only way to present the thing-in-itself will be an inadequate one. For Hegel,
what needs to be dropped from Kant’s sublime is only the positivity of the
noumenal, the idea that there actually is something behind or beyond the world
of phenomena. The truth is, behind and beyond the world of phenomena lies
nothingness, because negativity is the very fabric of the phenomenal world, its
impossible condition of possibility.
What does this mean for subjectivity? Žižek answers this question with
reference to a crude statement Hegel made in his conclusion of the section
on ‘Observation as Reason’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘the spirit is a bone’.
Like the sublime object of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, the bone, the skull, ‘is
an object which, by means of its presence, fills out the void, the impossibility
of the signifying representation of the subject’.6 The skull-bone of phrenology
expresses the impossibility of providing a positive definition of the subject
that is coherent with itself. In fact, the subject is ‘nothing but the impossibility
of its own signifying representation’.7 The void of the object corresponds to the
void of subjectivity.
Somehow, throughout his work Žižek stayed true to this conceptual finding,
mediated by the transformation Hegel imprints on Kant’s transcendental
philosophy. But in order to find a full philosophical justification for it he is
forced to sacrifice one of the centrepieces of Kant’s philosophy, that is, the
dependence of the synthetic a priori of transcendental subjectivity on the
matter of given sensations. When one claims that objectivity, in its negativity,
is correlative to the negativity of subjectivity, one leaves aside precisely the
need to presuppose that ‘by means of sensibility objects are given to us’8 and
that all other internal representations are of a different nature than the matter
of sensations. Žižek’s juxtaposition of the negativity of subjectivity onto the
negativity of objectivity effectively suspends Kant’s transcendental premise
with regards to the separation of reflective activity from that on which reflection
is exerted, in other words, the separation of the way the subject accesses, in
terms of knowledge, the world from how the world is itself constituted. What
follows is necessarily a reformulation of the very logic of philosophy. This is why
Žižek felt the need to embark on the path of the Doctrine of Essence of Hegel’s
Logic, both in The Sublime Object of Ideology and Tarrying with the Negative,

6  Žižek 2009, p. 236.

7  Ibid.
8  Kant 1996, p. 72.

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in order to extract its more valuable insight, that is, the analysis of reflection
and its development from positing to determining. Whilst transcendental
reflection is external and needs to assume an object as given in order to
be set into motion, the more properly ‘Hegelian’ reflection, or determining
reflection, presupposes its own self-positing activity in the form of objective
immediacy. To put it in clearer terms, unlike the external reflection that does
no more than start from and return to the immediate determinacy on which
it labours, determining reflection, when intervening on objective immediacy,
‘realises’ that all the properties it attributes to it are none other than its own
properties. This means that, contrary to what is postulated by transcendental
philosophy, the negativity that traverses determining reflection is no different
from the objective ‘substance’ on which it exerts itself; rather, it is homogeneous
to it.
In Tarrying with the Negative, the philosophical regime imposed by Hegelian
determining reflection keeps projecting its effects onto the constitution of
modern subjectivity, on the cogito, on the intrinsic virtuality of the real, on
the unmasking of forms of ideological legitimation, and all the more typically
Žižekian themes, but at the same time it also allows for a broadening of the
spectre of the more general philosophical problems raised by Hegelian
philosophy. In Chapter 4, still under the aegis of the Doctrine of Essence
in the Logic, Žižek discusses Hegelian themes such as synthesis (understood as
the point where difference appears rather than disappearing), contradiction
(understood as the antagonistic relation between being-in-itself and being-
for-other), the relation between ground and conditions (understood as an
extension of the difference between positing and external reflection), the
nexus between contingency and necessity (understood so as to transform
the first term into the second in a gesture of ‘formal’ conversion), and that of
necessity and freedom (where the latter is such when it turns the contingent
series that preceded it into something that expresses a deeper necessity).
The key moment, however, is probably the passage from external to internal
negativity, to use the terms of Sartre and of the Laclau and Mouffe of Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy. The incompleteness of knowledge does not reflect
an inequality between subjectivity and objectivity, but an inequality that
is internal to the object itself. The reason why the substance is not subject is
not that, evolutionally, it progressively opens up to new levels of organisation
and complexity, but that it is separated from it at the outset. The subject
‘participates’ in reality because reality is distant from itself.
The reading of Hegel in The Ticklish Subject demonstrates a deep
appreciation of Fichte’s turning point in his positing of the I as Tathandlung

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and of Schelling’s investigation in his Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of

Human Freedom and The Ages of the World, where he proposes a new ontology
of freedom. Fichte’s Anstoss is also reinterpreted as an ‘object-cause of desire
that splits up’ the subject,9 and the difference found in the God of Schelling’s
Inquiries between ground and existence is only a different version of the
pre-ontological space that Hegel would formulate in the Jena Philosophy of
Spirit with the image of the ‘night of the world’, where ‘here shoots a bloody
head – there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just
so disappears’.10 In other words, reason, to cite Schelling’s Inquiries, is nothing
but ‘regulated madness’.
Hegel also serves the purpose of properly configuring one of the main
issues of the book, the relation between universal and particular. For Žižek,
Hegel’s concrete universal is an anticipation of Althusser’s overdetermination
and coincides with ‘a process or a sequence of particular attempts that do
not simply exemplify the neutral universal notion but struggle with it, give a
specific twist to it – the Universal is thus fully engaged in the process of its
particular exemplification; that is to say, these particular cases in a way, decide
the fate of the universal notion itself’.11 In any case, Žižek seems to proffer two
versions of this concept, one of ‘Marxian’ derivation, the other, paradoxically,
of ‘Deleuzian-Guattarian’ inspiration. The former presumes not only that the
universal is given in the totality of its species, and thus in its exceptions, but
also that it is realised as such in one of its species (that is, Marx’s financial
capital, which is both a particular capital alongside other particular capitals,
and the embodiment of capital itself).12 The latter, on the contrary, presumes
that the universal is linked to the indefinite production of its exceptions (like
the unconscious in the first page of the Anti-Oedipus that flows into all sorts
of different vital functions only to eventually self-contract) (pp. 757–8). In
our view, Žižek’s oscillation between these two matrixes of Hegel’s concrete
universal is not due to some defect in his exposition; this indeterminacy
affects the very positing of the question of Hegel’s concrete universal as
what results from the relation between the universal and particular species.
Thinking Hegel’s concrete universal in this fashion, in fact, entails a return to
an Aristotelian framework that is unable to accept the philosophical novelty
inherent in Kant’s conceptualisation of a priori synthesis. In the phase of
his ‘philosophy of identity’, Schelling had already perfectly accounted for

9  Žižek 1999, p. 45.

10  This is Hegel’s first Jena philosophy of spirit, quoted in Žižek 1999, pp. 30–1.
11  Žižek 1999, p. 102.
12  Žižek 1993, p. 132.

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the erosion of this Aristotelian framework, when he developed the notion

of ‘potency’, and so too had Hegel when he rejected the universal/particular
scheme on which he had built his System of Ethical Life and embraced, instead,
in his two philosophies of spirit from Jena, the hendiadys consciousness/spirit.
The spirit, as manifestation and self-particularisation that never disperses its
identity, lies beyond the separation between the identity of its universality and
particularity and their difference.
However, in The Ticklish Subject, Hegel’s lesson on the antagonism that
breaks from within reality and subjectivity as a moment of reality itself is
already presented as the only way to re-think dialectical-materialist ontology,
to definitively safeguard it against the grip of Diamat and its ‘laws’, though
they too were to some extent derived from Hegel. Hence, the subtitle of Less
than Nothing is: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. There is a
two-fold identification here: Hegel names both the still-obscure possibility of
dialectical materialism, and a dark possibility inherent to reality itself, which
the book proposes to explore. But before entering a discussion of the book,
it is appropriate to shed a veil on a figure who is absolutely crucial to Žižek’s
philosophical universe, whom we have not mentioned to simplify our operation
thus far: this is the figure of Lacan. Since The Sublime Object of Ideology, the
new reading of Hegel and German Idealism put forward by Žižek is clearly and
declaredly indebted to Lacanian psychoanalysis. The effort is two-fold: Žižek
tries to read Hegel through Lacan and Lacan through Hegel.
If we were to briefly sum up the way Lacan works in Žižek’s effort to renew
Hegel’s image, we would use terms similar to those used by the author himself
on such occasions: the passage through Lacan allows for a definitive break with
a view of subjectivity, one where the subject is first alienated and then ‘returns’
to itself by alienating itself from this alienation. Lacan, the theoretician of the
inescapable circle between the Real and the symbolic order and of the il n’y
a pas de rapport sexuel, the theoretician of the unavoidable antagonism that
structures reality, is the best antidote to any attempt, such as Lukács’s in History
and Class Consciousness, to ‘re-dialecticise’ critical theory by grafting onto it
the narrative of a subjectivity that remains dialectical only until it is rejoined
or reconciled with objectivity. On the contrary, the void that constitutes
subjectivity and its objective correlative paradoxically demonstrates that
only in conciliation can antagonism manifest itself in all its flare. But in Less
than Nothing Žižek seems to maintain one point of contact with the Lukács of
History and Class Consciousness, when he claims that, rather than rediscovering
the Hegelian roots of Marx, one needs to correct Marx through Hegel. Lukács
had done this, as is well-known, by integrating the figure of the proletariat as
subject-object with Marx’s discourse, while Žižek proposes to do it through

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Hegel’s notion of thought that, like the owl of Minerva, takes flight only at
dusk. Here the delay of the subject with respect to reality, as a delay of reality
with respect to itself, prevents subjectivity from absorbing the substance of
reality, something Marx’s dream of communism had prefigured as the era of
the demise of alienation.

Less than Nothing: Hegel inside Geviert

Now it is time to confront Less than Nothing directly. This is a boundless work
and any ambition to account for it exhaustively is bound to be frustrated. In
some senses, this work could be said to touch upon all four folds of Heidegger’s
Geviert, the earth, the sky, mortals and gods. The starting point is a retracing
of Plato’s theory of Ideas (the ‘sky’) as the truth of the material world (the
‘earth’). In this role, ideas are invested by contradictions: whilst the empirical
can be both ‘One’ and ‘Many’ because it simultaneously partakes in the ideas
of unity and multiplicity, the idea itself cannot, because if it did it would
regress ad infinitum, and thus it cannot partake in both unity and multiplicity.
Plato clearly outlines this contradiction in the first part of the Parmenides
where he ‘transfers’ it to the relation between ideas. In the second part of the
dialogue, eight deductions or hypotheses are formulated and derived from
an examination of the consequences of this contradiction for the One and
the Many, which entail the assumption of other, more essential, hypotheses
(whether One is or is not, whether there is a One or not). As we know, the
Parmenides does not proffer a positive conclusion, and this led its interpreters
to see it as a pure, unproductive exercise in logic, or a piece of neo-Platonist
theology avant la lettre. Instead, Žižek opts to read

the entire set of hypotheses as a formal matrix of eight possible worlds

[. . .]. The eight worlds implied by the eight hypotheses are not some kind
of forerunner of a postmodern ‘plurality of universes’: they arise against
the background of a certain impossibility or deadlock which generates
them – the impossibility of ‘reconciling’ Being and the One, the Real and
the Signifier [. . .]. There are many worlds because Being cannot be One,
because a gap persists between the two. (p. 52.)

Yet this gap does not point to a conceptual deadlock: it is possible to put
forward a ninth hypothesis that turns the oscillation of One between being
and non-being into the reason why Nothingness is. The gap of this oscillation
between being and non-being becomes ‘a thing of nothing’ (p. 60), a nothing

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that can reclaim some quality of being, though an extremely weak one.
For Žižek, Democritus’s den is exactly this, less than nothing, that is to say,
a spectral ens that results from the subtraction of negation. All of this could be
represented by what might be seen as the minimal proposition of dialectical
materialism: if ‘there is no One, just multiplicities of multiplicities, then the
ultimate reality is the Void itself’ (p. 67).
However, the Geviert can also be read through bipolarity: alongside the line
between sky and earth, it also commands the retracing of that between gods
and mortals. Having concluded his examination of the general state of reality,
Žižek moves on to demonstrate, on the one hand, the necessary inscription of
the position of the subject in the classification of the structures of objective
reality, and, on the other, the negativity that is internal to the divine. In a
Hegelian fashion, Žižek believes that Christianity is the ‘absolute religion’
that reveals the secret of all religions. The Christian God is one that, whilst
becoming conscious of itself, becomes inexistent and collapses. This is why
Christ must die: as soon as the fiction is consumed, and God is none other
than the virtual substance of our existence, a piece of the real has to die, in a
Lacanian fashion. If, however, God was identified with a ‘hole’ in the symbolic
order, then it would prefigure the ‘Cartesian cogito, the barred subject ($),
this pure evanescent point of enunciation betrayed by any enunciated’
(p. 105). In other words, the negativity internal to the divine is the same as the
negativity internal to the subject. And here Fichte makes his appearance: Žižek
devotes a long examination of his thought in Less than Nothing, one that is
more attentive than ever to the difficulties that permeate the absolute, which
Fichte was strongly committed to build in the Doctrine of Science from 1801–2
onwards. The Anstoss takes centre-stage again. This,

is formally homologous to the Lacanian objet a: like a magnetic field, it is

the focus of the I’s positing activity, the point around which this activity
circulates, yet it is in itself entirely insubstantial, since it is created-posited,
generated, by the very process which reacts to it and deals with it. (p. 151.)

Thus the Anstoss is not merely an external obstacle to the realisation of the
identity of the subject with itself; rather, it is that object whose production
allows the subject to posit itself, whilst producing its inner split. According to
Žižek, this laceration of the fullness of the I is something Fichte was not fully
prepared to accept. This is also what separates him from Hegel, who marks
a point of discontinuity in the history of philosophy precisely because he
managed to grasp that what in the first instance presents itself as a condition
of impossibility of our being is, on the contrary, the ultimate condition for

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our existence. Bringing this truth of the Hegelian project to light is not easy:
the influence of post-Hegelian philosophy prevents access to it, as it largely
concentrated on restoring the irreducibility of that real substance which had
been allegedly absorbed into the logical nature of Hegel’s thought.13
For Žižek, this turning the condition of impossibility of our being into
a condition of its possibility that, alone, guarantees access to ‘absolute’
knowledge corresponds both to an Althusserian ‘process without a subject’
and its antithesis. On the one hand, it is a ‘process without a subject’ to the
extent that logical determinations, or those of ‘real philosophy’, develop ‘by
themselves’, resulting in ‘absolute knowledge’ or the ‘absolute spirit’ without
the intervention of the subject and its own idiosyncrasies. On the other hand,
it is also a process that needs subjectivity, both in re and at its end-point.
In re, because it requires the subject to be active to destroy the particularity of
its Gesichtpunkt in order to give way to the Standpunkt of totality; at its end-
point, because there the subject can reveal the antagonism that determines
the process only by accomplishing the ‘formal’ shift in standpoint that Žižek
had partly referred to in Tarrying with the Negative. What is this, exactly? To
clarify we could refer to the famous struggle between master and servant in the
Phenomenology of Spirit: the fear of death forces the servant to recognise that
his own particular self has no value and there is no recompense for it. There,
Žižek asks:

13  At the opposite extreme lies the operation of the Pittsburgh Hegelians, who offer a
‘deflated’ image of Hegel in an attempt to rule out the notion of the Absolute that
eats up the whole of reality, thus reducing him to a theorist of discourse and of the
‘possibilities of argumentation’ (Žižek 2012, p. 237). In doing so, they deprive him of all
his ‘ontological-metaphysical commitments’ (ibid.). This removal of the ontological
place of Hegel’s philosophy is also demonstrated by Žižek when he mentions the way
Pippin, one of the best-known exponents of contemporary American neo-Hegelianism,
reconstructs the passage in Hegel from nature to spirit. For Pippin, it is not ‘the thing-
in-itself’ that develops from nature to spirit, but the way we develop the conditions of
intelligibility of the world. Pippin’s reading of the transition from nature to spirit is,
thus, ‘transcendentalist’, ‘Kantian’. Žižek notes, with acumen, that Pippin’s thesis is
valid only in so far as it presupposes a sort of materialist evolutionism, the notion that
natural organisms, when reaching a degree of complexity, can no longer interpret their
strategies of action using the categories presented in Hegel’s philosophy of nature. But
this criticism ought to be radicalised: Pippin’s conception of nature is unsatisfactory as a
whole. Bowie 2007 and Siep 2009 have moved in this direction and aptly underlined the
restrictive character of a notion of nature as mere ‘space of causes’ rather than as also part
of ‘expressive’ kinds of human experiences (Bowie) or an opportunity for man to develop
non-normative values (Siep).

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What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing all the
wealth of his particular Self? Nothing – in overcoming his particular
terrestrial Self, the Servant does not reach a higher level of a spiritual Self;
all he has to do is to shift his position and recognize in (what appears
to him as) the overwhelming power of destruction which threatens to
obliterate his particular identity the absolute negativity which forms the
very core of his own Self. In short, the subject has to fully identify with
the force that threatens to wipe him out: what he feared in fearing
death was the negative power of his own Self. There is thus no reversal
of negativity into positive greatness – the only ‘greatness’ here is this
negativity itself. Or, with regard to suffering: Hegel’s point is not that
the suffering brought about by the alienating labor of renunciation is an
intermediary moment that must be patiently endured while we wait for
our reward at the end of the tunnel – there is no prize or profit to be
gained at the end for our patient submission; suffering and renunciation
are their own reward, all that has to be done is to change our subjective
position, to renounce our desperate clinging to our finite Selves with
their ‘pathological’ desires, to purify our Selves towards their universality.
(p. 198.)

Thus the truth revealed in reconciliation is not an irenic re-composition

of antagonism, but the validation that antagonism has now penetrated the
subject and ‘relativised’ it, fully bringing it back into the realm of finitude.
However, this recognition of its finitude in no way weakens the subject, on the
contrary, it reveals its freedom: precisely because it lies in the absolute and is
homogeneous to its structure, the subject breaks its extraneousness with the
object to the extent that it decides to free its grip and let it be (pp. 401–2). When
the object is apprehended, ‘consumed’, then the only act that still reveals the
freedom of the subject is one where the subject emancipates itself from itself
and its freedom: the object seizes its otherness again and can thus give rise to
a different logical-ontological development.
In Žižek, the establishment of a relation between the freedom of the subject
and the absolute does not amount to a triumph of necessity; freedom is not
knowledge of and identification with necessity as, following Spinoza, it was in
Engels, Plekhanov and a large number of twentieth-century Marxists. Hegel
teaches that our immanence in history is also a historicisation of our relation
with the past and its necessity. What individuals actualise is not a pre-existing
objective structure; to do so they would have to know their place in history.
And how can one know one’s place in history if history is itself constantly
reinterpreted? If, thanks to action, the present retro-acts on the past, then we

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must accept that we ‘determine the cause allowed to determine us’ (p. 213), the
effect that is the cause of its cause. Dialectics can then no longer set the scene
where the potential is actualised and the in-itself becomes for-itself; instead,
it will be the recording of successive acts of re-description of the past and its
necessity. There can no longer be a necessary becoming; instead, there is a
becoming of necessity, a permanent conversion of necessity into contingency.
Žižek adds that this is how we should interpret Hegel’s invitation, in the
Phenomenology, to conceive of the substance as subject:

the subject as the Void, the Nothingness of self-relating negativity, is

the very nihil out of which every new figure emerges; in other words,
every dialectical passage or reversal is a passage in which the new figure
emerges ex nihilo and retroactively posits or creates its necessity. (p. 231.)

Hegel transforms the condition of impossibility of our being into what makes
this being possible and in so doing he promotes a new concept of ‘ideology’
that is very different from that of orthodox Marxism. The latter conceives of
ideology as an inversion of the correct relation of derivation of consciousness
from material reality; instead, Hegel creates the opportunities to critique as
‘ideology’ anything that turns the conditions of realisation of our identity
into obstacles for it. But this ideological operation is not merely ‘mental’, as
evidenced by the nascence of anti-Semitism,

the most elementary form of ideology. [. . .] The anti-Semitic figure of

the Jew, the foreign intruder who disturbs and corrupts the harmony
of the social order, is ultimately a fetishistic objectivization, a stand-in, for
the ‘inconsistency’ of the social order itself, for the immanent antagonism
(‘class struggle’) which generates the dynamic of its instability. (p. 201.)

Therefore, though via a different thought-process than orthodox Marxism,

for Žižek ideology remains a social function and cannot be transferred to the
‘transcendental’ level of our experience of knowledge of the world, as one
finds, to some extent, in Althusser and the later Jameson.

A Discussion of Jameson

In Jameson too, it is possible to detect a desire to retrace the structures of

Hegel’s philosophy, one that derives from his dissatisfaction with the way the
question of the Absolute had been dealt with hitherto. His basic idea seems

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to be that by ‘absolute’ one must understand what Sartre would have called
a ‘process of totalisation’, the attempt to synthetically recompose what was
separated analytically. Therefore, the absolute can correspond neither to
the terminus ad quem of a teleological path, nor to the metaphysical unity
of object and subject, nor to a method that is abstractly separated from the
content nor to the possession of a knowledge that is fully content with itself.14
The absolute must be divested of all ‘narcissism’ so as to preserve the possibility
of an encounter with the most radical otherness.15 Such radical otherness has
always been pursued by philosophies of difference, though by questionable
means, especially their recourse to ‘mystical evocations and imperatives’.16
However, the absolute must also be separated from the vicissitudes of self-
consciousness so as to maintain the communication channel with radical
otherness open. Jameson claims that in Hegel, by the time consciousness turns
into self-consciousness, that is, I=I, the foundations for thinking the Absolute
as the elimination of radical otherness have already been laid. Besides,
consciousness turns into otherness negating its difference precisely because it
is time.17 Therefore, what needs to be articulated is a spatial dialectics that can
prevent the attainment of truth as a ‘lightning flash simultaneity of self and
world’.18 But if truth were open to radical difference, dialectics would no longer
be able to draw on a one-sided formula of its essence. Dialectics, then, has to
derail all attempts to identify it; it must multiply the places of its operations
and take on different names.
This movement of thought seems similar to that which articulates the
relationship between the imaginary and the symbolic in Lacan, and leads, as
we have seen, to rethinking dialectics in ‘reflexive’ ways. Dialectics is, in so
far as it constantly dialecticises itself. This forces it to establish a relationship
with its opposite and to aspire to make it a constitutive element of its field of
expression. Therefore, dialectics has to establish a relationship with the strong
anti-dialectical instance present in contemporary thought (from structuralism
to poststructuralism) and even with what we might call non-dialectics: the
untold, volcanic and indefinite multiplicity of social experiences, cultural
practices and political events of global and postmodern late capitalism that,
whilst retaining a dialectical core, hide it behind Erscheinungsformen that
are ever more rigid and reified. The truth is not posited in the phenomenal

14  Jameson 2010, pp. 1–4.

15  Jameson 2010, pp. 130–1.
16  Jameson 2010, p. 131.
17  Jameson 2009, pp. 68–9.
18  Jameson 2009, p. 68.

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forms of our everyday life but keeps revealing itself through them. Because of
this, the old task Hegel had taken on, to ‘save phenomena’, must be recovered
by those Lenin called ‘the materialist friends of dialectics’. Žižek’s greatness
as a dialectician, in Jameson’s view, precisely consists in his ability to ‘save
phenomena’ and do so in a non-empiricist way, by gathering instances of
mediating Vernunft.19
In this perspective, nothing escapes the proceeding of the dialectical spiral.
If dialectics is fully self-reflexive, if it is capable of constantly ‘doubling’ itself,
relating to its opposite and thematising its fluidity, no theoretical adversary
seems able to really rise up against it. And yet, on closer inspection, one realises
that there is at least one adversary capable of annihilating the potential of this
theoretical asset: that is, positivism, or radical empiricism (especially that
of Anglo-Saxon provenance). Positivism hardens and atomises conceptual
determinations; it fights all processes of mediation and totalisation, reasserting
the reification and fetishism characteristic of the processes of global and
postmodern late capitalism.20
Jameson gives this adversary a Hegelian name – ‘Verstand’ – and a Marxist
one – ‘ideology’. The Hegelianisation of this object is intended to consign it to
an existence that is relatively independent of its historical and social totality.
This relatively independent existence is also safeguarded, as we have seen,
by the use of an Althusserian version of ‘ideology’, which draws an almost
‘transcendental’ radius around the relation between individuals and their
material conditions of existence. In this configuration, then, the intellect is a
sort of ineradicable mental function that characterises all our daily activities
and relates them to the errors that are later overcome by reason.21
Having hunted down all reifications, Jameson paradoxically ends up creating
a more robust and intangible one, a reading of Verstand inspired by Verstand.
Against his interpretation, Žižek argues – convincingly in our view – that
both the intellect and reason fully belong to the dialectical spirit. This means
that reason has a function that is not other from that of the intellect, and is
able to unify, in a further tertium, the opposites that the intellect analytically
separates. Reason is the intellect freed from its illusion of reaching a field
of unity of opposites that exists beyond them. Another consequence of
relevance to critical social theory is that Žižek’s position weakens the almost
‘transcendental’ pretences of ideology interpreted in the terms of Althusser,
and proposes anew a more intimate relationship between ideology and the
analysis of the mode of production.

19  Jameson 2009, pp. 57–9.

20  Jameson 2009, p. 4.
21  Jameson 2010, p. 119.

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Aufhebung and Negation of Negation

With our discussion of Jameson we have reached the very heart of the question
of Aufhebung, of the negation of negation: if the unity of the opposites does
not lie beyond them, what form does their negative relation take? On this
issue, Žižek’s argument becomes quite complex: the negation of negation could
take on the matrix of ‘Rabinovitch’22 (who turns the problem into its solution),
that of ‘Adorno’ (who resolves it in the manifestation of antagonism at its most
acute degree) and that of ‘Irma’23 (where the result of the process of negation
is a manifestation of the two opposing sides of the Lacanian Real, the abyss
of a primordial Life-Thing and the symbolic resolution). In any case, contrary
to a notion of the negation of negation as the overcoming of a rupture between
essence and its particularisation generated by the first negation, Žižek claims
that the second negation coincides with an inscription of the subject within
the objective process where the transition from one opposite to another has
already taken place. On this, the example of crucifixion is helpful: ‘the subject
first observes the most radical “negation” imaginable, the death of God; then,
it becomes aware of how the death of God opens up the space for its own
(subjective) freedom’ (pp. 299–300).
In the negation of negation – and here we reach the discussion in Less than
Nothing of the ‘limits’ of Hegel – Žižek finds something Hegel could not include
in his philosophy: the concept of an objet a, that, like an indivisible remainder,
results from the process of negation rather than exceeding it. This can clearly
be seen in the theory of marriage in the Philosophy of Right; here Hegel is
manifestly incapable of understanding the excess of love as an overwhelming

22  This is the protagonist of a joke set in the ex-Soviet Union whom Žižek often refers
to in his books. In Less than Nothing it can be found on pp. 242–3: ‘Rabinovitch wants to
emigrate from the Soviet Union for two reasons: “First, I fear that, if the socialist order
disintegrates, all the blame for the communist crimes will be put on us, the Jews.” To the
state bureaucrat’s objection: “But nothing will ever change in the Soviet Union! Socialism
is here to stay forever!” Rabinovitch calmly answers: “This is my second reason.”  ’ The
Rabinovitch matrix is described on p. 479.
23  The reference is to Freud’s dream of his patient Irma’s injection. Žižek discusses it in Less
than Nothing on p. 479: ‘The dream begins with a conversation between Freud and his
patient Irma about the failure of her treatment due to an infected needle; in the course
of the conversation, Freud gets closer to her, approaches her face and looks deep into
her mouth, confronting the horrible sight of the red flesh of her throat. At this point of
unbearable horror, the tone of the dream changes, the horror all of a sudden passes into
comedy: three doctors, Freud’s friends, appear, who, in a ridiculous pseudo-professional
jargon, enumerate multiple (and mutually exclusive) reasons why Irma’s poisoning by the
infected needle was nobody’s fault (there was no injection; the needle was clean . . .).’

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and lethal passion that indicates, rather than the natural essence of man,
the accomplishment of his process of spiritualisation and the institution
of the rituals that support it. This excess is at work in another blind-spot of
Hegel’s philosophy, the development of the rabble as an inevitable outcome
of the growth of wealth in civil society. Here Hegel fails to understand that
the rabble, rather than incongruous with the universality of society, is the very
embodiment of the universal as an excluded particularity. Had he managed
to understand this, Hegel would have ‘invented’ the notion of ‘symptom’ and
come closer to Marx. In the last instance, what Hegel allegedly misses is the
concept of ‘repetition’, the blind compulsion to repeat located in the death-
drive. Therefore, the reason his ‘mediation’ is imperfect is not that it cannot
fully mediate the irreducible finitude of our being, as post-Hegelian thought
sustains, but that it was unable to confront the ‘obscene infinity or “immortality” ’
(p. 493) of the death-drive. Lacan is credited with the ability to integrate this
element into Hegel’s discourse and for this reason it is indispensible to read
Hegel through Lacanian lenses.
Lacan’s ‘repetition’ of Hegel comes straight after the more Hegelian part
of the book. Many are the issues that surface here, from a discussion of
correlationism (the idea that one can access the correlation of thought and
being but not each term taken separately) and its critics, to a discussion of
structuralism; from a critique of cognitivism to an outline of the diverging
paths of desire and the drive. One issue, however, seems prominent amongst
the others; that is, the ontological extension of the objet a. Lacan’s ‘repetition’
of Hegel cannot be carried out unless we have found exempla of that objet
a that Hegel rules out from his philosophy. Žižek dwells specifically on the
voice and the gaze, as ‘objects’ that embody in themselves their own points
of impossibility. But at this stage of the text another partial object of Freud,
the phallus, assumes a relevant role as a signifier of symbolic castration
and the medium through which the big Other, what Hegel would have named
the ‘objective spirit’, acts and speaks.
One of the most significant conclusions Žižek reaches in his discussion
of correlationism and its opponents is the need to inscribe the interaction of
subject and object within the Real itself. In the last part of the book, Žižek
focuses on politics and science, both procedures for gleaning truth that
explicitly represent this interaction. From here two more relevant theoretical
confrontations emerge, one with Badiou, the other with Heidegger.
Badiou’s main mistake, as Žižek had already argued in The Ticklish Subject,
was to see the order of being as a totality that is homogeneous to itself, thus
forgetting Schelling’s and Hegel’s teachings on the emergence of appearance

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from an inner conflict that precedes it. Heidegger’s mistake is that he failed to
portray the emergence of common political will under the sign of antagonism.
A recuperation of Heidegger’s philosophy is thus only possible if the occurrence
of Being opens up to class struggle.
Having sided with Bohr’s version of quantum physics, as opposed to
Heisenberg’s, and thus with the claim that the cause of the incompleteness
of knowledge is not the impossibility of not altering the exact coordinates
of a particle when our act of measuring intervenes, but rather the very
inscription of subjectivity in objective physical processes, Žižek comes to
borderline cosmogony, defending the decisiveness of the distinction between
two Nothings, one that precedes Democritus’s den, the other that is posited
as such. The book, however, concludes politically, working out a programme
to politically suspend ethics. Many reflections emerge here, amongst these:
a defence of leftist political engagement and the recovery of the category of
‘exploitation’ against ‘domination’. But the Hegelian tone of the debate is still
visible: Žižek believes that the hiatus between party and people can be closed
by the figure of the leader, similarly to what occurs in Hegel’s State, where only
the subjective nature of the prince allows for a consolidation of political unity.

The Chiasmus between Marx and Hegel

Having outlined the main argument of Less than Nothing, it is now necessary
to place under close scrutiny the most delicate and problematic nodes of
Žižek’s theoretical work in this book. Here, we are going to dwell on two
questions: the reading of the process of valorisation in Marx, and his notion
of ‘contradiction’.
As to the relation between Marx and Hegel, as mentioned earlier, Žižek
believes that it must be determined outside of any ‘genealogical’ framework.
The question is not one of measuring ‘how much’ Hegel lies in Marx, but how
Hegel can ‘correct’ Marx’s errors. However, looking closely at the dynamics
of his argument, it seems not only that Marx is ‘corrected’ by Hegel, but also
vice versa. The idea that Hegel’s dialectics rest on a ‘disjunctive syllogism’, on
a conceptual mechanism where a singularity represents the universality of
the whole series of particularities time and again, is particularly evident in
the relation instituted, in Marx’s value-form, between commodity and money,
between, that is, ‘particular’ commodities and the ‘universal’ commodity that
can represent the value of all other commodities precisely because it is excluded
from their world. On this relation, Žižek comes to recover a ‘genealogical’

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inspiration: like many contemporary thinkers of value-form theory (from

Helmut Reichelt to Chris Arthur), Žižek sees a homology between Marx’s value
and Hegel’s concept or spirit. However, this homology only works to a degree,
for Žižek: Marx is said to have demonstrated that the logic of capital as a self-
valorising process that autonomously posits its own presuppositions is only
a fantasy of capital itself; the self-regenerating cycle of capital can only be
sustained if an external source, labour-power, continues to invest it with new
value time and again.
Hegel’s dialectics is not only the model of the ‘logical’ dialectics of the
critique of political economy, but also of its ‘historical’ dialectics. Thus, Hegel’s
dialectics is also used to outline a framework, based on the notion of the
proletariat as ‘substanceless subjectivity’, whereby the historical process goes
from

pre-class society to capitalism in a gradual separation of the subject

from its objective conditions, so that the overcoming of capitalism means
that the (collective) subject re-appropriates its alienated substance.
(p. 250.)

Since these two dialectics are not easily resolved into one another because
the nexus between capital as automatisches Subjekt and the proletariat
as substanceless subjectivity is unclear, the reference to Hegel in the late
Marx’s critique of political economy seems structurally ambiguous. With
this conclusion, Žižek raises many doubts: the first objection which might be
raised is that the self-valorisation of value described in the ‘logical’ dialectics
of capital presupposes the reduction of labour-power to commodity promoted
by the separation of the worker from the objective conditions of production,
which is also the very basis of the ‘historical’ dialectics of Capital. Therefore, at
least in this respect, there is more unity in Capital between ‘logic’ and ‘history’
than Žižek is prepared to admit. But in our opinion, the real punctum dolens of
his position lies elsewhere, precisely in his view that capital as a self-valorising
value is, though socially objective, a fantasy, because value only results from
the exploitation of a source that is external to the whole process, that is,
living labour. We believe that in this, Žižek’s position obscures the fact that,
for Marx, labour-power only produces wealth in the form of value because,
to an extent, it is already homogenous with capital as infinitatio of value. For
Marx, labour-power equals the general possibility of producing value, thus
something that, unlike concrete labour, which always refers to a determinate
quantity of value, corresponds to the infinitatio of value found in capital. It

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could also be said that capital only emerges as such when through exchange
it integrates the infinity of value present in money in potentia24 with the infinity,
in the sense of indeterminacy, that labour-power unleashes.25 Whilst it is true
that the self-valorisation of value would not be possible unless new value was
extracted from the use of labour-power, labour-power is not added from the
outside to sustain the whole process: its figure is isomorphic with that of value.
This means that when Marx starts describing value as something that only
exists to the extent that it self-accrues, he is not portraying a socially objective
fantasy, he is describing a real abstraction (objectively real, rather than, as in
Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s work, inter-subjectively real) whose repercussions on the
whole realm of socio-economic relations are so deep that value demands to be
exchanged with something that wholly corresponds with itself.
The exteriority of the relation between labour-power and capital Žižek
believes to have identified must thus be corrected. But this correction also entails
a reconsideration of the idea that whilst the concept of capital as automatisches
Subjekt can be located within the ‘logical’ sphere of Marx’s critique of political
economy, the concept of the proletariat as substanceless subjectivity belongs
to the ‘historical’ one. Actually, if we take Marx’s concept of ‘labour-power’
in its specifically conceptual meaning, it becomes clear that the concept of
the proletariat as substanceless subjectivity, one that is ‘expropriated’ from the
relation with the objective conditions of production, is actually the premise on
which to think of labour-power as the general possibility of producing wealth
in the form of value. As Marx clearly states in the Grundrisse,26 had the worker
not been separated from the means of production, he would not have all the
formal and abstract qualities that make him ‘labour-power’, a factor that is also
integrated in the process of production of capital. But if this is the case, the
separation between capital as automatisches Subjekt and the proletariat as
substanceless subjectivity sketched by Žižek has no authentic foundation.

‘Contradiction’: Internal Inequality or Reflected Negativity?

It is hard to tell whether a Lacanian ‘repetition’ of Hegel can help an

exhumation of the truths of Hegelian philosophy buried under two centuries
of post-Hegelian thought. What is certain is that this would more easily occur

24  Marx 1976, pp. 230–1.

25  Marx 1973, p. 296.
26  Marx 1973, p. 297.

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if some of the bottom-line aspects of Žižek’s work could be isolated from the
elusiveness that sometimes surrounds them. To clarify, let us take the question
of antagonism as a factor that structures even Hegel’s reconciliation. Žižek
makes the question of antagonism the core of his re-interpretation, although
this issue has always troubled the theoretical debate on Hegel. One of the
most traditional divides of the latter is that between those who defend the
‘preservation’ of contradiction within synthesis and those who believe that
contradiction belongs only to the finite, not the absolute (as is the case in
the arguments put forward by British Idealism, for instance, which are worth
examining). Even the interpretation of Hegel’s single works has been affected
by this divide; a considerable number of readers are sure that contradiction
is nowhere to be found in the Doctrine of Being of the Logic. Besides, what is,
for Žižek, the meaning of contradiction or antagonism in Hegel (as the two
terms, in Less than Nothing, turn into one another)? In our view, the clearest
explanation of Žižek’s interpretation of Hegel’s contradiction is to be found in
his discussion of the theses of Quentin Meillassoux. Here, he states:

contradiction is necessary and at the same time impossible; that is, a finite
thing precisely cannot be simultaneously A and non-A, which is why the
process through which it is compelled to assume contradiction equals
its annihilation. [. . .] ‘Contradiction’ is not only the Real-impossible on
account of which no entity can be fully self-identical; ‘contradiction’
is pure self-identity as such, the tautological coincidence of form and
content, of genus and species, in the assertion of identity. There is
time, there is development, precisely because opposites cannot directly
coincide. (pp. 628–9.)

Elsewhere, Žižek adds two important aspects to this argument:

1) The shift from opposition to contradiction is one from the gap between
two opposites to one located within the One;
2) The two moments of contradiction, the opposites that do not coincide in
the One, are ‘the Thing which eludes our grasp and the distorting screen
which makes us miss the Thing’ (p. 535).

Contradiction is thus given when the opposites that are possible separately
converge into the unity of the thing, making it impossible and thus destined
to change. What Žižek fails to specify, however, is what logical relation the
opposites must engage in so as to ‘collapse’ into the thing. Unlike Žižek,
Hegel provides numerous indications of this and they serve the purpose

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of an exposition of the conceptual sequence that runs from identity to

contradiction. The opposites that ‘result from diversity’ are such because
each is the specific opposite of the other, and thus each opposite is integrally
signified by the opposition. This is why Hegel is completely immune from
those who criticise his argument for making propositions such as ‘man is
three-paddle’ possible (‘man’ and ‘three-paddle’ are diverse terms, deprived
of all specifically opposing relations). The paradigm of his logical argument
is actually the relation between positive and negative. The positive is positive,
that is, opposed to the negative, in so far as all the logical determinations it
can exhibit are determined by its being opposed to the negative.27 Given that
opposition is the negation of the other and the identity of each is instituted
the moment the other is negated, negating the other will then equal negating
what makes the identity of each possible. Negativity will be reflected in itself.
This is why the fundamental term of mediation between opposition and
negation is what Hegel calls ‘exclusive reflection’, one’s negative exclusion from
oneself.28 Contradiction is thus provoked by the active exclusion of oneself as
other, and not, as we seem to find in Žižek, by the impossibility of suturing the
gap within the thing. The new unity produced will be given by the realisation
that these two self-negating processes that occur within the opposites are in
fact one and the same process.
To sum up: the decisive moment in Hegel’s argument on contradiction is
not, we believe, the non-coincidence of the opposites internal to the One,
but the coincidence of their self-negating activity. Hence, in this context, the
centrality of self-reflected negativity in Hegel. On the contrary, an insistence on
the non-coincidence of the opposites inside the thing will create an image of
contradiction that recalls the antagonism of Laclau and Mouffe in Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy, or Schelling’s opposition in God between ground and
existence. The Hegel of the twenty-first century risks being a ‘Schellingean’
Hegel.

27  This is why when, in Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek speaks of the opposition between
father and son as a good example of Hegelian opposition, he partly goes off the rails (see
Žižek 1993, p. 131). Whilst it is true that Hegel himself uses this example, he does not fail
to remark that the representation aptly removes the relation of opposition that exists
between father and son because the father possesses, as Žižek recognises, many more
determinations than those which lead to his differentiation from the son. This is, in other
words, a ‘trivial’ example (see Hegel 2010, p. 383).
28  Hegel 2010, p. 386.

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In conclusion, what does Žižek’s attempt to reconstruct dialectical materialism

amount to? Can the argument he presents throughout Less than Nothing
be said to be convincing and lay claim to validity? In our view, the less than
exceptional results of the reworking of one of the most important categories
of dialectical thought, that is, ‘contradiction’, does not lend it support.
Whether intentionally or not, the success of any attempt to rethink dialectics
depends on a reworking of the categories of ‘totality’, ‘mediation’, ‘opposition’,
‘difference’, ‘negation’, as well as ‘contradiction’. Undoubtedly, Žižek deserves
credit for one major achievement: upsetting the traditional opposition
between ‘Western Marxism’ and Diamat. With Western Marxism, he argues in
favour of an understanding of objectivity that includes from the outset the
instance of subjectivity; yet contrary to it, and similarly to Diamat, he believes
that this amounts to no less than the constitution of ontology. Mind you, this
is not an ontology of ‘presence’: Žižek was schooled in Heidegger’s critique of
Vorhandenheit, and by Derrida, the theoretician of ‘spectres’. Precluded is any
access, which Diamat contemplates, to the dream of a substantial reality that
is fully homogeneous to itself. As stated earlier, in his perspective, the void of
objectivity must correspond to a void of subjectivity, and vice versa. In other
words, dialectical materialism, as the title also suggests, can only be thought of
as a mere shadow of itself.
However, in our view it is precisely when Žižek moves from the affirmation
of this principle to the analysis of its effects that highly interesting scenarios
become possible for the fate of dialectical materialism. Let us consider the
question of the relationship between freedom and necessity. The determinist
line it takes on in Diamat is well-known. But for Žižek, following the realisation
that ‘void’ subjectivity is immanent to an equally void objectivity, comes
a deep historicisation of our relationship with the past and its necessity. If,
as we have seen, thanks to the action of subjectivity, there is retro-activity
on the past, we have to concede that we ‘determine the cause allowed to
determine us’: the effect will be its own cause. Dialectics, then, consists in
the recording of successive acts of re-description of the past and its necessity.
There will no longer be a necessary becoming; only a becoming of necessity,
a permanent conversion of necessity into contingency. If there is no longer a
definite framework of potentiality, of formally-given propositions whose
accomplishment and realisation can only be awaited, then it will be possible
to impose, with a new image of the relation between freedom and necessity,
the need to return to questioning the most neglected and undervalued
philosophical issue today: that of history. Žižek’s dialectical materialism could
demonstrate its productivity especially when placed next to this great issue,
allowing us to determine it again from outside of the traditions of the Second
and Third International.

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