Žižek’s return to the idealist subject: beckett, the
TRANSCRIPT
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 47.1 March 2021: 149-176 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.202103_47(1).0008
Žižek’s Return to the Idealist Subject:
Beckett, the Failed Absolute and the Poetry of Anxiety
Will Greenshields
School of International Studies
Zhejiang University, China
Abstract This paper introduces the distinctiveness of Slavoj Žižek’s reading of literature
by examining the import of his praise (proffered in the recently published Sex
and the Failed Absolute) for Samuel Beckett as “the great writer of abstraction”
and deployment of Friedrich Hölderlin as a counterexample. It begins by
distinguishing what Žižek refers to as “idealism pushed to its limits”—that is,
his retention of the idealist subject within a materialist project—from other
contemporary idealisms and materialisms before turning to the question of how
it informs his understanding of literature and other modes of literary criticism
such as new historicism. Specific attention is paid to the apparently anti-
materialist importance granted to the negative power of abstraction as opposed
to a materialist analysis of the concrete and particular. To further elucidate the
stakes of Žižek’s project, a comparison is drawn between Kant’s transcendental
“I” and the “transcendental poetry” or “literary absolute” of the German
Romantics on one hand and Žižek’s “failed Absolute” and what he has baptized
“poetry (of anxiety)” on the other.
Key Words
Slavoj Žižek, Samuel Beckett, Friedrich Hölderlin, G. W. F. Hegel, idealism, materialism,
Romanticism
150 Concentric 47.1 March 2021
Introduction
The difficulty of precisely locating Slavoj Žižek’s philosophical system on the
spectrum between materialism and idealism is evidenced by his call for a
“materialism without matter” or a “materialism with an Idea” (Absolute 73; emphasis
in original) and by the titular phrases provided by his most careful exegete and
interlocutor, Adrian Johnston, for whom Žižek is said to have constructed a “new
German idealism” and a “transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity.” Given
the frequent references in Sex and the Failed Absolute to non-orientable and unilateral
topologies such as the Möbius strip, one expects that Žižek would take issue with an
oppositional model of two distant poles or sides, preferring instead a Möbian
relationship whereby what seems to be two distinct surfaces in fact, when taken to
their most extreme point, turn into each other. This is not just a commonsense
warning against an excessively faithful adherence to one side—whereby a
materialism’s matter, following the purist injunction against reference to the
ideational and an emphasis on the anteriority or primacy of matter, risks posing an
unconditioned ground, having matter adopt the formal role of Spirit—but an
insistence that the true essence of one lies at the extremity of the other: “the only way
to be a true materialist today is to push idealism to its limit” (Absolute 31). This
theoretical shove leads Žižek, in the final chapter of Sex and the Failed Absolute, to
discuss the process of “violent abstraction”—a method typically considered inimical
to materialism’s assemblage of concrete determinations—that presages “‘concrete
abstraction,’ abstraction which grounds its own concrete totality” (452). There, he
presents Samuel Beckett as the exemplary writer of abstraction.
Key to Žižek’s “idealism” is his insistence on the enduring value of its subject,
which he presents as an amalgam of Descartes’s cogito, Hegel’s subject and Lacan’s
$. This subject is abstract, universal and negative and yet is somehow linked to the
concrete, particular and positive. Wary of philosophical abstraction detached from
the text, (materialist) literary criticism has recently concentrated on the latter trio. In
the first half of this paper I shall explain what exactly Žižek means by idealism pushed
to its limits and distinguish the materialism it announces from several contemporary
materialisms and idealisms before turning to the question of how it informs Žižek’s
reading of literature—more particularly, the works of Beckett, who has in recent
years become a privileged reference point for a materialism that preserves a place for
the cogito, not in the form of the self-contained and autonomous subject that became
literary theory’s bête noire but as a gap, pure negativity.
Will Greenshields 151
Is literature, for Žižek, anything more than the meek reflector of Hegelian-
Marxist-Lacanian truths, an illustrative supplement to abstruse theorizing? Certainly,
segues such as “[l]et us clarify this crucial point by way of a detour through literature”
suggest that literature is merely a helpful but inessential concession to the reader
befuddled by dialectical reversals whose cumulative peroration repeatedly lead to the
revelation of subjectivity’s groundless ground (Less 324). More seriously, however,
the deployment of an example, the particularly rapid mode of which is Žižek’s
signature, raises the question of the presentation of philosophy or, more precisely,
the presentation of philosophy’s subject—a question that was central to the project
of the German Romantics of the Athenaeum project, for whom the infinitely self-
reflective work, literature as Absolute, was the (never actualized) solution to the
problem of philosophical exposition, the question of how to present Kant’s formal
subject, the unconditioned condition of presentation. Importantly, Žižek’s subject is
assuredly not the transcendental “I”: the subject is not absolutely external to
perceived reality, nor is it the post-structuralist subject reducible to a series of
unstable representations, but is instead an immanent gap in positive presentation. This
abstracted subject is paired with the “failed Absolute” (Substance)—not “the
Absolute as the ultimate substantial reality” but the “fragile” Absolute, the Other that
is itself cracked, lacking (Sex 18-19). My concern here is literature’s presentation of
the “failed Absolute,” or what Žižek refers to as “poetry (of anxiety)” (439).
This “failed ontology” (4) and the concomitant refusal to rigidly ally with
idealism or materialism necessitates a refusal to meet certain expectations about the
presentation of a system and the systematicity of presentation, expectations that in
recent texts Žižek addresses with a mixture of angst and belligerence:
I am well aware that [Sex and the Failed Absolute] may appear to some
readers somehow stuck halfway: while it tries to break out of the
transcendental vicious cycle [i.e., to answer Kant’s challenge without
retreating to a naïve materialism or doubling down on subjective
idealism], its result is ultimately a negative one, i.e., it fails to deliver
a new positive-realist vision of the universe—all it provides is a kind
of empty space between the two (transcendental space and reality), a
gesture thwarted in its own completion. . . . [However,] this thwarted
identity is my vision of the Real, it is the basic condition of our lives.
Caught in the horizon of metaphysical expectations, my critics don’t
see that what they (mis)perceive as an intermediate state of passage
already is the final result they are looking for . . . they constrain the
152 Concentric 47.1 March 2021
unorientable surface into the horizon of “orientable” progress. (12-13;
emphasis in original)
The wariness regarding a positive vision of politics and history, the presentation of
an “empty” and irresolvable “space” between the transcendental and the material, a
gesture that succeeds in failing and fails in succeeding, the appeal to a “basic
condition,” scepticism regarding “‘orientable’ progress” and finality . . . as much as
one’s critical conscience might council against the crude conjuncture of philosophy
and literature, particularly when discussing Beckett, whose works have an uncanny
habit of making such overlays look very foolish, it is hard to resist the observation
that Žižek sounds rather Beckettian here. His isolation of the gap in the subject
(“transcendental space”), the subject qua absolute negativity, and his overlapping of
this gap with the gap in substance (“reality,” Other, etc.), the failed Absolute, is not
an initial diagnosis of a philosophical deadlock that will eventually lead to a
prescribed medicament and a happy restoration of the Absolute; his “failed ontology”
is all; a philosophical gesture that thwarts its own completion and which cannot
become a positive transcendental or realist vision.
This indicates the increasing difficulty of philosophy’s presentation in Žižek’s
work, where the deadlock is not to be overcome but to be thought and exemplified.
The evental moment, the contact between the barred subject and the barred
Other/substance—it is only from this, Žižek contends, that the authentically free
subject can emerge—“is the unique moment of my contact with the Absolute” (22)
and it is this that is presented in “poetry (of anxiety)” and, in particular, Beckett’s
works. If, unlike many other contemporary trends and figures in literary and critical
theory—encouraged by post-humanism and uneasy about anthropocentrism’s
consequences—Žižek continues to insist on the theoretical worth of idealism’s
subject, this is not a contrarian reassertion of humanism but a discernment of the alien
core of the subject and its contact with the equally inhuman Other. It is in this and his
insistence that, contra new historicism, the subject is an abstract universal, that his
distinctiveness and significance for literary studies resides.
Idealism and Materialism
If Žižek asserts the imperative to reinject post-Kantian idealism into
materialism, why does materialism require what we might ordinarily understand to
be its irreconcilable opposite?
Will Greenshields 153
In categorizing reductive materialisms, he has adopted Alain Badiou’s
deprecatory term “democratic materialism,” which can be otherwise understood as
“a materialism without idea, a materialism without idealism” (Ruda 87). Today,
democratic materialism dominates following the apparent vanquishing of idealism; it
is the ideology of a free market capitalism that governs various facets of our
contemporary situation, from elections to pharmacology, and is the unreflective
belief of its subjects. It consists in the cynical axiom that there are no infinite and
universal truths; there are only finite and individual bodies and languages. Nothing
exceeds material reality, the existence of bodies and languages. According to “the
pragmatics of desires,” ostensibly served by the market, “the individual is convinced
of, and formatted by, the dogma of our finitude, of our exposition to enjoyment,
suffering and death” because, in our state of post-modern pessimism and consumerist
inebriation, “the body is the only concrete instance for desolate individuals aspiring
to enjoyment”—the enjoyment found in the interminable accrual of objects and
experiences (Badiou, “Bodies” n. pag.). For the individual reduced to their body, this
ideology is egalitarian yet restrictive: every body has a right to enjoyment (or
suffering) but no more than that. Languages are plural and equally recognized but
articulation outside of “the global halting point of [democratic materialism’s]
tolerance” (n. pag.)—the point beyond the globally accepted and legislated norms of
capitalism, the point at which some (external, universal) truth might be approached
by language—is forbidden (although, sadly, the concrete manifestations of these
prohibited discourses have done a perfectly adequate job of discrediting themselves).
Žižek expands democratic materialism beyond parliamentary capitalism, using
it to refer to any intellectual stance for which the ultimate reference point is matter,
“from scientist naturalism to the post-Deleuzian assertion of spiritualized ‘vibrant’
matter” (Absolute 72). In a biological materialism, according to which there exist
only bodies, genomes and neurons, there is no transcendental subject that emerges
from matter, only a sophisticated accumulation of biogenetic code that will eventually
be entirely understood and reproducible. Notwithstanding the stringent atheism of its
popularizers, this materialism preserves a utopian idealism—“the idea that reason can
make nature totally transparent”—and revives Fichte’s self-positing subject in the
dream of scientifically reproducing humans (6). Today, it is not the finitude of a
pragmatically contracted epistemological or ontological horizon that is associated
with materialist empiricism but “the spirit of infinity” (Less 657), the dream of
transcendence commonly represented in the popular imagination by the conversion
of consciousness to software. In reference to Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A
Political Ecology of Things, Žižek also dismisses a contrary effort to infuse
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materialism with idealism, to perceive the operation of spirit in substance, on the
basis that its “implicit equation: matter = life = stream of agential self-awareness”
lapses into a “weak panpsychism” or spiritualized ecology of non-human and human
actors (Absolute 8). Idealism returns in a degraded form.
In opposition to the new materialism(s), Žižek poses his own “materialism
without matter” by which he means materialism without “the metaphysical notion of
matter as a full substantial entity—in dialectical materialism, matter ‘disappears’ in
a set of purely formal relations” (73). As Johnston points out, there are two distinct
theses here regarding the dissolution of the One of matter: that of a “weak nature”
(nature as no longer a consistent positivity) and “strong form,” that is, the contention
that nature, as conceived by post-Galilean mathematized science, is reducible to a
physicist’s assemblage of letters (137). The “weak nature” thesis is traceable to Lacan,
according to whom “even in scientific discourse it is clear that there isn’t the slightest
world. As soon as you can add something called a ‘quark’ to atoms and have that
become the true thread of scientific discourse, you must realize that we are dealing
with something other than a world” (On Feminine 36). Plumbing the sub-atomic
depths, until one reaches a point that scientists have chosen to designate with one of
Joyce’s nonsense words and which is itself, according to string theory, composed of
one-dimensional vibrating fragments of energy (a one-dimensional line can only exist
as an idea and not as a material thing), matter becomes progressively more uncertain
and indeed seems to “disappear,” no longer coinciding with “the metaphysical notion
of matter” as the only authentic existence. For a materialism that takes account of the
latest scientific developments, matter is far from being a solid reference point
anchoring the philosopher’s Weltanschauung. Žižek also finds a rich resource for his
comingling of idealism and materialism in the Schellingian distinction between
existence and the ground of existence and the revelation, by way of quantum
indeterminacy, that this primordial ground is itself groundless, ontologically
incomplete.
Žižek is also wary of constructivist accounts of subjectivity and subject
formation, distinguishing his own materialism from Foucauldian discursive
materialisms that diagnose ideologies and subjects as formed by the discursive
practices of symbolic networks and social institutions. This recognition of language
as a means of production generates two unsatisfactory conclusions: either we must
commonsensically distinguish between the secondary affixing of deceptive language
and the primary object, the true objective reality, then jettison the former and scout
out the latter, or “we [are] dealing with the more radical linguistic version of
transcendental constitution”; the tempting notion that there is no objective reality,
Will Greenshields 155
that the thing-in-itself is a mere illusion blinding us to the fact that “our symbolic
activity ontologically constitutes the very reality to which it ‘refers’” (Less 7). Neither
naïve realism (the real is absolutely outside discourse, therefore: it is the only thing
that authentically exists) nor cynical post-structuralism (the real is a variable
discursive construction or an effect of discourse, therefore: the real does not exist) is
a desirable outcome. Following the “linguistic turn” in continental philosophy, there
are only subjected bodies and the signifiers that occlude them.
Foucault described his project as the attempt to “create a history of the different
modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (326): the
identification of a historically variable discursive a priori responsible for the process
of subjectivization. In contrast, central to Žižek’s preservation of the idealist legacy
is the distinction “between subject and subjectivization”—between discursive
construction and the immaterial void that precedes (and persists alongside) it: “the
subject is prior to the process of subjectivization: this process fills in the void (the
empty form) that is the pure subject” (Absolute 80). Importantly, abstraction is not a
secondary extraction from the concrete but is instead prior.
While Žižek certainly does not want for exemplary instances of
subjectivization—his books teem with varied illustrations of the lures and traps of
ideological interpellation and the tangled routes through subjective formation
mapped out by Lacanian psychoanalysis—a presentation of the Absolute negativity,
“the pure subject,” the subject that is “prior” to representation, is, understandably,
harder to come by.
Subject and Substance
The most acute flourishes of idealism in the history of philosophy—Žižek’s
references points here are Plato, Descartes and Hegel, as thinkers of the immaterial
Idea, cogito and Absolute knowing, respectively—can be followed around the
Möbian twist to their materialist underside. For example, a timeless, universal Idea,
such as that of love, is an event: far from being separated from material existence,
straightforwardly belonging to the eternal realm of otherworldly forms, it instead
emerges into (as “an Absolute,” a paradoxical “appearing of the suprasensible”
(Absolute 182)) and fundamentally alters material reality. The “‘materialist truth’” of
the binary between material reality and the Idea is not that the latter is merely a
dangerous delusion or ineffective aspiration but that the Idea can intervene in “the
spatio-temporal order of reality” that, because there are only bodies and languages,
is itself stuck in its own form of eternity or “bad” infinity, the “eternal movement of
156 Concentric 47.1 March 2021
generation and corruption,” the interminable undulations that are only locally
effective (Less 36). The materialist truth that both Žižek and Badiou insist upon is
“the notion that empirical reality can ‘participate’ in an eternal Idea, that an eternal
Idea can shine through it, appear in it” (36). For Žižek, Beckett is not the writer of
perpetual “corruption.”
With the term “pure subject,” the subject prior to subjectivization, Žižek is
essentially referring to Lacan’s theoretical revival of the Cartesian cogito. This
revival forbade any bridging of the gap between the function “I think,” stripped of
any memories, preconceptions, impressions and relation to an external object that
might thicken this unbearable lightness into a substantive personality, and the
positivity of the thinking thing, the substance that thinks. These two subjects, the
empty “pure form” and the product of subjectivization, do not coincide; the pivotal
gap or antagonism between form and content, abstract and concrete, remains because
the “presence” of one necessarily renders the other impossible: “At its zero-level,
subject is an entity which is its own pure possibility which by definition remains non-
actualized (the moment it is actualized, it is ‘substance’ and not ‘subject’). Subject is
a pseudo-entity which only ‘is’ as the outcome of the failure of its actualization” (Sex
382). This subject cannot be integrated into reality and remain the subject that it is.
This impossibility of actualization, of the presentation of empty form in
philosophical or poetic content, echoes the problem inherited by the German
Romantics from Kant. However, because for Žižek the definition of a worthy
materialism is that subject is not straightforwardly excluded from substance, this
abstract negativity or “pseudo-entity” is not Kant’s transcendental “I” of
apperception; it remains out of joint without simply persisting beyond.
Žižek blends the conceptual framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis with
German idealism, swapping the terms substance/Other and taking the Hegelian
possibility of “reconciliation” between subject and substance to mean an
acknowledgement of the subject’s own alienation in the Other, the acknowledgement
of “the decentred Other as its own site”—the recognition, arrived at in the
psychoanalytic clinic, that the subject’s discourse is the discourse of the Other, the
subject’s desire is the desire of the Other, and so on (Absolute 346). Psychoanalysis
does not just guide the subject to a recognition that their alienation in the Other is not
the obscuration of a truer identity but that it is their identity qua alienated subject; a
further necessary step involves the realization that the Other is itself barred and
lacking and not the shadowy monolith that determines the subject absolutely. There
is then a transposition of the two lacks, the lack in the subject and the lack in the
Other, the radical, undetermined freedom of “absolute negativity” and a gap in the
Will Greenshields 157
previously domineering, omniscient Other: “what the subject experiences is that the
lack/gap in the (substantial) Other is the condition of possibility, the site, of the [free]
subject itself” (347). What had previously been experienced as the site of contingent
yet pervasive identifications and attachments—the environs environment of
subjectivization not subject—becomes the site of “evental self-deployment” (182).
The psychopathological subject is constituted by the trauma of a missed
encounter with the Other’s lack—expressed as an overwhelming and unintelligible
desire/emptiness that Lacan, channelling Kant’s Ding an sich, terms das Ding—that
is only mitigated by the interjection of a third term (the paternal metaphor), the
accession to the symbolic order and alienation. What preceded alienation, then, was
an “inconsistent mess” rent with traumatic antagonism rather than the Edenic
wholeness that is only the retroactive and fantasmatic effect of alienation/castration
at the hands of the signifier (149). This is the transcendental frame’s original sin: an
always incomplete subjective mediation emerged from the primary failure of
mediation. It is from this missed encounter, this failure to comprehend the barred
Other as das Ding, that Žižek proposes to break the transcendental false choice
between an Absolute that is inaccessible to the finite subject and an anti-subjective
realism:
[S]ubjectivity emerges when substance cannot achieve full identity
with itself, when substance is in itself “barred,” traversed by an
immanent impossibility or antagonism. . . . [Subject’s] failure to fully
grasp the opposed substantial content, simultaneously indicates a
limitation/failure/lack of the substantial content itself. . . . There is no
new positive content brought out here, just a purely topological
transposition of the gap that separates me from the Thing into the Thing
itself. This redoubling of the gap, this unique moment of realizing how
the very gap that separates me from the Thing includes me into it, is
the unique moment of my contact with the Absolute. (Sex 21-22)
Hegel termed this cognizance Absolute knowing.
The question then becomes how to present this philosophical thought, this
“purely topological transposition of the gap,” a formal operation that concerns the
organization of non-signifying voids, without a lapse into the production of “new
positive content”? How might an abstract negativity persist alongside a concrete
positivity without the former being actualized as a mere element of the latter?
158 Concentric 47.1 March 2021
Abstraction and History
Contrary to Fredric Jameson’s materialist imperative to “always historicize,” to
situate events and figures with respect to their determining material conditions, Žižek
argues for a counter-intuitive materialist defence of abstraction, granting it a concrete
efficacy. Here, abstraction is not the idealization of a particular element in the
existing reality but the identification of “the excess of abstract negativity” in the
“concrete totality” as that which persists in the “all” of a positive and finite totality,
rendering it cracked and “not-all” (Sex 346-47).
Following Hegel, Žižek offers madness as an example of just such an abstract
negativity. Madness is not a “factual necessity” (345), it is not a temporary stage in
development that every nascent subject must endure, nor is it just a sporadic blemish,
an infrequent misfire in subjects’ smoothly functioning psychopathology that implies
a clear division between concrete totality and abstract negativity— whether the
former passes through the latter and leaves it behind or whether the latter
intermittently invades the former. According to Žižek’s “thwarted ontology,” the
obstacle to the realization of a coherent and consistent subject and its (fantasmatic)
reality is immanent not external, formal not occasional/factual: “the radical negativity
which threatens to destabilize every identity is inscribed into its very core” (343). No
longer a contingent pathological moment within subjectivization but structurally
essential to the subject, madness is constitutive of the “normal” subject. Žižek
repeatedly cites the infamous passage from Hegel’s Jena lectures in which he
describes the “pure self” as “this night, this empty nothing,” a nightmarish heart of
darkness punctuated only by corporeal disjectafragments and pseudo-ontological
shades (“here shoots a bloody head—there another white ghastly apparition”) (qtd.
in Sex 350). The “empty nothing” retrieved by Hegel’s florid abstraction is the “pure
subject” that remains irreducible in the processes of subjectivization and inter-
subjectivity, anterior to and yet persistent within the recuperative consolidation of
self-conscious subjectivity habituated to external reality. For Žižek, Hegel’s “night
of the world,” the mad withdrawal from the world, is the originary groundless ground
of subjectivity and not the exceptional effect of a psychological calamity or the result
of the well-practiced sophistry of an anti-essentialist. This human mind stripped of
humanity is not the demonstration of the instability or non-existence of essence; it is
the essence. Stressing the activity of dissolution and dismemberment at this point of
pre-symbolic subjectivity over the synthetic power of transcendental imagination,
Žižek aligns himself with Schelling and the early Hegel’s conjecture that the “entire
process” of subjectivization “is rooted in an external point of extreme singular density”
Will Greenshields 159
which means that “in the Hegelian edifice, abstraction (the excess of abstract
negativity which cannot be sublated into a concrete totality) persists” (345).
But how exactly does insanity precede the malleable results of subjectivization?
On this point, Žižek refers to the parallel that Hegel makes between madness and
crime:
This interpretation of insanity as a necessarily occurring form or stage
in the development of the soul is naturally not to be understood as if
we were asserting that every mind, every soul, must go through this
stage of extreme derangement. Such an assertion would be as absurd
as to assume that because in the Philosophy of Right crime is
considered as a necessary manifestation of the human will, therefore
to commit crime is an inevitable necessity for every individual. Crime
and insanity are extremes which the human mind in general has to
overcome in the course of its development. (qtd. in Sex 345; emphasis
in original)
Certainly, in its “empirical development” or history, madness/crime presupposes
normality/law; the former is defined by its contravention of the latter. However,
conceptually speaking, madness/crime, as a structural extreme rather than a “factual
necessity,” a vanishing point that structures the picture rather than an object in the
picture, is the “formal possibility constitutive” of normality/law (345-46; emphasis
added). There is thus a “discord between actual historical development and its
conceptual rendering” concerning the status of madness: an actualized violation of
norms that delineate it or a structural void that the “normal” subject must clamber out
of (346). According to the Hegelian conceptual rendering, the human mind or
subjectivized “normality” is not an “all” that defines its exception (madness) and, in
doing so, secures its status as a bounded totality: it is instead a “not-all” to which the
“pure subject” is always constitutive and immanent instead of constituted and exterior:
[W]hat makes Hegel’s “concrete universality” infinite is that it
includes “abstractions” in concrete reality itself, as their immanent
constituents. . . . What, for Hegel, is the elementary move of
philosophy with regard to abstraction? To abandon the common-sense
empiricist notion of abstraction as a step away from the wealth of
concrete empirical reality with its irreducible multiplicity of features:
life is green, concepts are grey. . . . Philosophical thought proper begins
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when we become aware of how such a process of “abstraction” is
inherent to reality itself: the tension between empirical reality and its
“abstract” notional determinations is immanent to reality, it is a feature
of “things themselves.” . . . [T]he basic insight of Marx’s “critique of
political economy” is that the abstraction of the value of a commodity
is its “objective” constituent. . . . [T]he properly Hegelian
reconciliation is not a peaceful state in which all tensions are sublated
or mediated but a reconciliation with the irreducible excess of
negativity itself. (350-51; emphasis in original)
In this ingenious twist on his familiar defence of theory in the face of calls for
pragmatic engagement, Žižek rejects the caricature of philosophical thought as the
cerebral movement toward greater abstraction from the concrete—an interminable
and indulgent process of theorizing that divests philosophy of its material efficacy—
in favour of a gradual awareness that the abstract has logical priority; that it is always
already extimate to material reality. For example, Marx’s concept of value is an
effective form in “a materialism of real abstractions” (Toscano 1223; emphasis in
original). The philosopher’s discernment of the abstract within the concrete is distinct
from what Badiou calls the Rromantic schema—art understood as a realization of the
suprasensible Idea within the sensible, presenting what philosophy could only
conceptualize, “teach[ing] of the power of infinity held within the tormented cohesion
of a form” (Inaesthetics 3). Whereas Romanticism offered art as a delivery from “the
subjective barrenness of the concept” (3), suggesting that it is only “green” and vital
when it has been realized in a particular and sensuous form, Žižek argues the reverse:
not only is it the immaterial and negative abstraction that makes the concrete “truly
alive,” one has to make an effort to exclude (rather than include) them: they are
“immanent” to, inherent in and constitutive of concrete reality (Sex 351). For Žižek,
it is not that art delivers us from the barrenness of the abstract but that art delivers the
shock of the abstract.
Ruminating on the historical determinants of subjectivity or the material
discursive practices that define the subject is not “philosophical thought” because the
subject is here obscured by subjectivization. Hence Žižek’s insistence on the
distinction between historicism and historicity: whereas the former presupposes a
finite totality in which every occurrence and figure can be explicated in terms of their
localizable determination—a stance that Lacan caustically dismissed as “the puppet
show” of “literary history” (Autres écrits 483)—the latter retains the unhistorical or
non-determined traumatic kernel, the infinite “evental self-deployment” that is
Will Greenshields 161
impossible until it happens and thereby retroactively posits its own conditions of
possibility, changing not just the future but the past as well. The puppet show to
which Lacan refers reflects the apparent triumph of the structuralist/historicist Other
over the subject and the consequent barring of freedom. Kant deploys the same
derogatory analogy in describing the effects on morality and freedom following the
triumph of the noumenal Other. Were this latter to be consistent and accessible, were
the Absolute to accede to our inquisitive gaze, “God and eternity in their awful
majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes” and our (moral) actions would be
entirely determined by this new knowledge and the fear and awe it would provoke.
There would be no freedom, no authentically decent act, for this morally pulverized
subject’s conduct “would thus be changed into mere mechanism in which, as in a
puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but there would be no life in the
figures” (Practical Reason 122; emphasis in original). For the subject to exist, the
(non-barred) Other must not exist (although, it should be added, for Kant this Other
exists; it is just not accessible).
While the Hegelian concepts of abstract negativity and concrete universality
have predominantly been deployed by Žižek and others with regards to politics and
ethics in order to think the “unhistorical” possibility of change, they also, as Lacan
suggests, have something to offer literary critics. Todd McGowan argues that it is a
direct challenge to new historicism—the puppet show determinism according to
which literature can only manifest or act-out the particularity of its historical
environment—since, following a reinjection of idealism into literary studies,
literature regains its capacity to articulate universal truths, not via some vague appeal
to transcendence and timelessness but through “its rupture from history” (94).
McGowan offers the example of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, whose famous reply—
“I would prefer not to”—accomplishes a rejection of the false choice imposed upon
the subject by ideology. It is an instance of authentic freedom, an uncoupling of the
barred subject from the non-barred Other and a transposition of lacks at the point at
which the subject appears as an incomprehensible hole in the socio-symbolic fabric.
Neither absolutized nor desacralized, the subject, stripped of all particular
determinants, is located not beyond the Other but at the point at which the Other fails.
The absolute “power of negativity that undermines the fixity of every particular
constellation” is the power of the subject, its infinitude and universality (Žižek,
Ticklish Subject 91). It is an abstraction within, but not reducible to, concrete reality.
If, to re-cite a quotation, the pure subject is a non-actualized “pure possibility,” “a
pseudo-entity which only ‘is’ as the outcome of the failure of its actualization” (Sex
382), then the figure of Bartleby is a realization of the literary (failed) Absolute, a
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presentation of the free refusal to actualize in accordance with the symbolic terms
that govern legibility. Literature is connected to its context at the points of its
disjunction, at the point at which it articulates something that the context finds
unintelligible (this does not necessarily mean “subversive” or “provocative,” both of
which are liable to recuperation by a flexible ideology). Žižek’s insistence that “not
everything is cultural” echoes Graham Harman’s proposed shift from the death of the
author to “the death of the culture”—that the literary object should be read for its
irreconcilability with, or withdrawal from, its time (“Broken Hammer” 201).
For Žižek, literature is at its most effective not as a narrative of subjectivization
or as a reflection of its context but as the staging of a contact with the (failed)
Absolute and a presentation of the subject. In this way, literature breaks out of the
“transcendental vicious cycle” with which we began, by rejecting the inadequacy of
subjective idealism and unsophisticated realism, the elevation of the pure subject to
an excluded point as the unconditioned condition or the reduction of the subject to
the result of material (biological, ideological, etc.) processes.
How—this is the question Beckett never stopped asking himself and which is
different to that of the Romantics—can one write abstract negativity within the
concrete particularity of a signifying formation and produce a (a literature of the)
concrete universal without concluding in positive content?
Anxiety and Narrativization
If the Romantics inherited a subject as that which thinks and grasps itself
thinking, then what was required was a “transcendental poetry,” a self-reflective work
that “in all its descriptions . . . should describe itself, and always be simultaneously
poetry and the poetry of poetry” (Schlegel 239). Žižek, by contrast (and without
mentioning Schlegel and company), advocates for a “poetry (of anxiety),” a poetics
that does not represent the discursive subjectivity studied by historicism nor
exemplify the unconditioned transcendental subject but rather “render[s] palpable the
very cut on which the human entry into the Symbolic is grounded,” exposing the gap
in substance and as subject (Sex 439). In other words, this poetry neither asserts the
transcendental circle (Romanticism) nor its material antonym but instead breaks it.
Žižek does not offer an immediate example of this genre. This is to be found, one
assumes, some twenty pages later, in the book’s final “scholium,” titled “Beckett as
the Writer of Abstraction.”
It is important to note that, in the Lacanian context, anxiety has a particular and
well-developed meaning: the traumatic affect from which the subject suffers when
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they encounter the void of the desiring Other in all of its overwhelming
incomprehensibility (as opposed to the illusorily totalized Other with which the
alienated subject typically interacts). Anxiety, according to Lacan, is the affect that
“does not lie” (Anxiety 128) because unlike the subjectivized and symbolically
integrated neurotic’s experience of the Other as “an immense fiction” governing their
“fate,” it is the traumatic experience of the real without mediation and representation,
that is, the inconsistent Other (“chaotic mess”) (46). If (discursive) truth, as Lacan
famously put it, has the structure of fiction because it can never be unambiguously
and entirely articulated—there is always something more to be said and something
that cannot be said—then a poetry of anxiety would be a signifying formation that,
while still not telling the truth, still not accomplishing a representation of the
unrepresentable, would nonetheless not lie about this failed Absolute.
In discussing Žižek and poetry, we immediately abut upon a problem, which is
that poetry is infrequently referenced in Žižek’s oeuvre and, when it is, it is often
criticized. Indeed, Žižek even jokingly aligns himself with Plato’s proposed exile of
the poets on the basis of his “post-Yugoslav experience, where the path to ethnic
cleansing was prepared by the dangerous dreams of poets” such as Radovan Karadžić
(Less 31). Less gravely, poetry is occasionally presented as a stylistic blunting of
philosophy’s keen edge or its regrettable redirection. For example, Žižek warns
readers of Hegel’s “night of the world” passage that they should not be dazzled by its
“poetic power” and instead must “read it precisely” (354). Here, a memorably
descriptive poetics threatens to obscure the very gap that it has been deployed to
represent. More damningly, poetry is also characterized as an ignoble “escape”
(“Burned” 227), a symptom of the inability to adequately philosophize an
irreconcilable deadlock in thought (which, if thought through in a disciplined
Hegelian manner, would be presented as its own reconciliation qua irreconcilable).
It is, in other words, not just a lax supplement to philosophical thought but a retreat
from this thought.
Žižek’s example of this unhelpful compromise formation is Hölderlin. Hegel
and Hölderlin shared an original conundrum: how can one surmount the gap between
the “lost pre-reflexive Ground to which we eternally long to return,” and “the modern
reflective freedom” (227)? The deadlock, to cite the title of Hölderlin’s 1795
fragment, is that between “Judgement and Being,” between the pre-subjective and
absolute union between subject and object—such that these terms are meaningless—
and the postlapsarian state of alienation marked by the capacity for differentiation
and representation. Hölderlin concludes that the best that can be accomplished is a
narrativization of an impossible return to the tragically asymptotic origin:
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[. . .] the goal of all our striving is to put an end to that eternal
conflict [Widerstreit] between our self and the world, to restore the
ultimate peace, which is higher than all reason, so that we can unite
with nature in one infinite whole.
Yet neither our knowing nor our acting, in any period of our
existence, takes us to the point where all conflict ceases, where all is
one: the determinate line unites with the indeterminate line only in
infinite approximation. (qtd. in Krell 21)
He “turns to poetry as the most appropriate way” to describe the “‘eccentric path’ of
man” (“Burned” 227)—most notably in Hyperion, which follows the titular hero torn
between Greece (Ancient Greece was considered by the Romantics to be a
civilization that achieved a state of harmony between itself and nature) and Germany
(intellectual reflexivity and a more than geographical distance from his origin). It is
the curse of distinction, the absolutely negative power of differentiation, whose
subsequent irreconcilability Hyperion can only recount and lament: “an instant of
reflection hurls me down. . . . Nature closes her arms, and I stand like an alien before
her and do not understand her” (4). Unlike Heidegger, who was much more
sympathetic to Hölderlin’s allegiance to poetry over philosophical thought, Žižek
considers it a failure resulting from the misguided apprehension of Nature as a
perfected substance in which the residues of divine sense still reside, perhaps legible
to the poet even after the gods have departed.
Where Hegel’s philosophy surpasses Hölderlin’s poetic narrativization of the
trauma of representation, the painful gap produced by reflexive Judgement, is in
positing this gap as already inherent in Being, necessary for the appearance of the
fullness of self-standing Being qua lost: “what [Hegel] adds to Hölderlin is a purely
formal shift of transposing the tragic gap that separates the reflecting subject from
pre-reflexive Being into this Being itself. Once we do this, the problem becomes its
own solution: it is our very division from absolute Being which unites us with it,
since this division is immanent to Being” (Žižek, Less 15). Žižek’s robust terms—
the “structural deadlock” to which philosophy leads, the “formal shift” that
philosophy achieves—indicate a certain wariness about the inherent incapacity of the
“particular formations” of poetry and narrative, as if their flabby excesses can at best
only decoratively individuate the universal impasse (“Burned” 227). This is echoed
in Žižek’s distaste for the late Lacan’s pastiches of Joyce, which reveal an enjoyment
of language’s extra-linguistic and non-communicative materiality that threatens to
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obscure what thought has hit upon: “Lacan sometimes gets seduced by the rhizomatic
wealth of language beyond (or, rather, beneath) the formal structure that sustains it”
(“Minimal Event” 300; emphasis added). Nevertheless, the necessity and difficulty
of presenting a formal structure without blurring it is reflected in Lacan’s
precautionary statements regarding the presentation of “the place of anxiety . . .
[which] constitutes a certain void. Everything that may show itself in this place
throws us off route . . . as regards the structuring function of this void” (Anxiety 56).
The shift from the Romantic literary Absolute to the Lacano-Hegelian failed Absolute
is the shift from a poetics that would ideally exemplify the transcendental “I” to a
poetics that situates “the place of anxiety,” the point at which subject and substance
fail and an authentic non-Fichtean freedom is realized. The subject is free not because
they are the unconditioned condition but because they are the result of a failed
conditioning: “we are free because there is a lack in the Other, because the substance
out of which we grew and on which we rely is inconsistent, barred, failed, marked by
an impossibility” (Less 263).
Destitution and Transcendence
Central to Žižek’s defence of abstraction is his adjustment of the orthodox
reading of Hegel’s distinction between Understanding (Verstand) and Reason
(Vernunft) and refusal to dispense with “Understanding and its power of abstraction”
(Sex 73). Understanding is the primary mode of thought: it is what differentiates and
pulls apart intuited reality, producing distinctions that break it up. Understanding
exercises the power of abstraction because it separates and abstracts things from the
concrete totality: “the subject always, constitutively, comes second, it refers to an
already given Substance, introducing into it abstract distinctions and fictions, tearing
apart its organic unity” (Less 374). (Nonetheless, as we have seen, this organic unity
is a fiction that only precedes the instance of the subject insofar as it is retroactively
conceived: “‘Reconciliation’ between subject and substance means the acceptance of
this radical lack of any firm foundational point: the subject is not its own origin . . .
it is dependent upon its substantial presuppositions; but these presuppositions also do
not have a substantial consistency of their own but are always retroactively posited”
[258-59].) Understanding is thus associated with idealism’s “pure subject” and
materialism’s barred Other/substance. As Hegel writes: “[. . .] that an accident as such,
detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context
with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—this is the
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tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure ‘I’”
(Phenomenology 19).
Speculative and dialectical Reason is typically characterized as a sophistication
of elementary Understanding since it complements the negativity of Understanding’s
crude analysis with productive synthesis; it is the measured reassembling of what
brutish Understanding has torn apart. It shows how the identities and categories
produced by Understanding’s incisions and excisions are complexly associated with
one another, thus achieving a superior grasp of reality’s teeming interrelations.
Understanding’s abstraction is merely an opening effort, to be surpassed by Reason’s
concrete universal. However, this commonsense partition of the abstract and the
concrete is itself a reductive abstraction. Žižek takes seriously Hegel’s proposition
that “we must recognize the infinite force of the understanding in splitting the
concrete into abstract determinatenesses and plumbing the depth of the difference”
(Science 610) and that the abstract must be considered as persisting immanent to the
concrete universal. Indeed, abstraction is, as we have seen, philosophical thought
proper, the turn away from a cataloguing of finite and empirical reality—what are
referred to in Murphy as “the beastly circumstantial” and “those demented particulars”
(11-12)—in favour of “its - notional determinations”:
How does a notion emerge out of the confused network of impressions
we have of an object? Through the power of “abstraction,” of blinding
oneself to most of the features of the object, reducing it to its
constitutive key aspects. The greatest power of our mind is not to see
more, but to see less in a correct way, to reduce reality to its notional
determinations—only such “blindness” generates the insight into what
things really are. (Less 279; emphasis in original)
It is precisely this ability to “see less in a correct way” that is at stake in Žižek’s praise
for Beckett as “the great writer of abstraction.” The particulars accreted through the
subject’s engagement in the world are eclipsed in the night of the world.
Žižek’s “idealism pushed to its limits” offers a novel response to what Peter
Boxall has identified as the critical task facing Beckett’s readers:
The problem that Beckett has addressed in his writing, and that Beckett
studies has addressed in seeking to develop a critical discourse that is
adequate to the philosophical and hermeneutic challenge represented
by his work, is how to calculate the value of nothingness . . . without
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either doing violence to such nothingness by translating it into
somethingness, or falling into the silence and inarticulacy that is the
only faithful response to the apprehension of “the being of nothing.”
(32)
The negative has arrived and the challenge, as Žižek might say, is to tarry with it. To
address a problem is not necessarily to resolve it but to acknowledge it, to present it.
This returns us to Žižek’s appraisal of his own project as a “gesture” that cannot find
“completion” in the orthodox sense of a rehabilitative synthesis or “positive vision”
(and he does not seem likely to embrace the defeatist alternative of “silence and
inarticulacy” either). The task is to understand Beckett’s nothingness as a tangible or
calculable “value” without betrayal in transposition or mystification in muteness.
Žižek offers a new perspective on the precise nature of the challenge taken up by
Beckett and on how Beckett reconciled it (in the Hegelian sense of the term). If, to
re-cite a quotation, the pure subject is a non-actualized “pure possibility,” “a pseudo-
entity which only ‘is’ as the outcome of the failure of its actualization” (Sex 382),
how can this subject be written without it becoming substance?
Here, it is worth briefly distinguishing Žižek’s Lacano-Hegelian reading of
Beckett’s subject from that of another important figure in contemporary materialism:
Deleuze. In “The Exhausted,” Deleuze observes an original relation between subject
and substance arising from the refusal to actualize. The logic of “see[ing] less” and
“Hegelian forgetting” (Absolute 229) echo Deleuze’s appraisal of Beckett’s
“amnesiac witness” (“Exhausted” 6)—the subject perpetually estranged from its own
history. However, whereas the former results in an abstraction from the concrete
totality, for Deleuze, Beckett scripts an exhaustion of the totality by refusing to
concretize it. Beckett’s subjects are ontologically invested in a process of exhaustion
in which various combinatories are outlined without any consequential distinction or
preference being made between the stated options. Whether it be Murphy’s biscuits,
“of which he could not partake in their fullness until he had learnt not to prefer any
one to any other” (Murphy 57), or Molloy’s stones—to be savoured in every possible
order “one after the other until their number [is] exhausted” (Molloy 70)—the task is
to exhaust the possible not through a choice that concretizes the possible into the real
but by an anti-teleological collection and articulation of every variable. The result is
an exhaustive “inclusive disjunction” in which difference is asserted but nothing is
excluded or extracted (“Exhausted” 5). This refusal to abstract an element from the
matrix is not the negative activity of Hegel’s “pure I”; rather, it is a perverse
reconciliation of Understanding’s analysis and Reason’s synthesis in which the
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power of the negative is never decisively realized and the productivity of synthesis
remains stunted in what is referred to in Anti-Oedipus as “the disjunctive synthesis
of recording” (Deleuze and Guattari 83). As Deleuze clarifies, “[t]he disjunctions
subsist, and the distinction of terms may even be more and more crude, but the
disconnected terms assert themselves through their nondecomposable distance, since
all they are good for is permutation” (“Exhausted” 4). This logic requires and
produces an exhausted subject, a subject that has forsaken any desire or requirement
to make a progressive choice. The relation between subject and object would be
transformed at the point of mutual exhaustion, a transposition of paradoxically empty
saturations. “[E]verything is truly finished” when “there is no more possibility” and
the subject is free (17, 8). In The Unnamable, the task switches from the exhaustion
of a miserable inventory to the exhaustion of the Other(s), the voices (Murphy,
Malone, “Mahood and Co”) that are “possible worlds” (7) dissolving the autonomy
of their creator: “Me, utter me, in the same foul breath as my creatures?” (Three
Novels 302). Here, the program abuts upon the aporia of “the inexhaustible series of
all these exhausteds,” the impossibility of concluding, of articulating a limit to the
series without lapsing into an articulation that extends the series (“Exhausted” 8). In
a bleak re-phrasing of the Romantic problematic, “I would have to arrive at I, not as
a term of the series, but as its limit, I the exhausted, the unnamable, I all alone sitting
in the dark, become Worm, ‘the anti-Mahood,’ denuded of all voice, so effectively
that I could only speak of myself with the voice of Mahood, and could only by Worm
by again becoming Mahood” (8). Were total exhaustion realized, the author (both
Beckett and the Unnamable) would disappear in the Work. Invoking Blanchot,
Deleuze proposes that this program of “extreme indeterminacy” is joined to the
much-heralded “decomposition of the ‘I’” in the literary work that, paradoxically, is
the moment the subject can finally emerge (5). If Schlegel’s “transcendental poetry”
is infinite self-reflection, a thinking of thinking, the poetry of exhaustion poses the
infinite serial of inexhaustible Other(s): “I am he who will never be caught . . . I knew
it, there might be a hundred of us and we’d still lack the hundred and first, we’ll
always be short of me” (Unnamable 342).
Without delving into how, according to Deleuze, this aporia is resolved in the
television plays, where there are only “all seen unsaid” images and exhausted spaces
without an instance of the subject, one can already see that, while Žižek does not
mention Deleuze’s reading, their understanding of Beckett’s subject is similar. . . and
yet very different. Deleuze even rephrases the exhausted’s rejection of choice as “I
would prefer not to, in the Beckettian formula of Bartleby” (4; emphasis in original).
So what, then, is the difference between exhaustion and abstraction? Whereas the
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former presupposes a suspended and disjunctive synthesis, a forever pending
totalization of non-realized substance, the latter presupposes a gap in the Other that
causes and is caused by the subject. Bartleby’s refusal to abstract is the moment of
the subject’s abstraction: the subject “is not just the agent of abstraction (tearing apart
what in reality belongs together), it is itself an abstraction, i.e., it emerges as the result
of the process of abstraction, of self-withdrawal from its real-life context. This is why
the ‘materialist’ demands to localize a subject in the texture of its ‘concrete’ historical
situation misses the key point: what disappears if we do it is the subject itself” (Žižek,
Sex 451). Where exhaustion is an attempt at totalization through which the subject
reveals substance’s grey redundancy or a limit, the “I” beyond other voices,
abstraction, rejecting this model of the Other as “all,” aims at the “not-all” via the
transposition of lacks, tearing a hole in its fabric where the subject appears.
Žižek’s reading of The Trilogy is a relatively conventional intervention in the
extensive debate as to which philosopher’s subject Beckett’s most resembles. The
Unnamable is understood to be the culmination of “a gradual reduction of subjectivity
to the minimum of a subject without subjectivity” that is the “Cartesian cogito”
(“Minimal Event” 302). I cannot here engage with the voluminous critical material
devoted to the link between Descartes’s and Beckett’s subject, particularly with
regards to the latter’s experience of space and time, or even ask if Žižek’s
understanding of the cogito is that of Beckett scholars—this reading is merely raised
here for two points of interest: firstly, that Beckett is cited as the writer of the subject,
not subjectivity, and, secondly, that Žižek does not invoke the Kantian subject. For
Žižek, the problem addressed by Beckett was not the familiar one of representing
subjective idealism’s condition of representation but that of breaking the
transcendental circle. Hence the philosopher criticizes the writer’s famous assertion
that words are a “stain on silence” as a backwards step, since it assumes that non-
discursive silence pre-exists the word rather than being retroactively posited by the
word (qtd. in Sex 23). Not being a literary critic, Žižek has no proprieties about
barging through the sensitive syntheses of scholarly Reason and abstracting his
Beckett, just as he extracts his Marx, arguing that sometimes the latter is so true that
he recoils from or does not fully understand the import of his own words. A repeat of
Andrew Gibson’s meticulous criticism of Badiou’s selective reading of an
“affirmative” Beckett would prompt no shame in Žižek.
The highly selective (or abstractive) nature of Žižek’s reading of Beckett is
exemplified by the deployment of the same quotation from Malone Dies three times
in Sex and the Failed Absolute: “Everything divides into itself, I suppose” (141).
Deleuze also avails himself of this line as an expression of exhaustion but, for
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whatever reason, omits the “I suppose.” A strident axiom that resembles
philosophical thought at its most abstract and yet most brutally concrete—we cannot
but think here, as Žižek does, of Mao’s observation that one divides into two—is
undercut by doubt. Even the judgement that all is uncertain, that there is no ultimate
term or foundation (we might recall here Žižek’s appeal to quantum physics), is itself
rendered uncertain. Through the additional twist that Beckett gives it, the
philosopher’s contention that “there is no metalanguage” fails even as a decisive
assertion of failure.
“I suppose” is symptomatically repeated throughout the trilogy, first as a
disconcerting tic in Molloy’s representation of the world:
I gave [my name], hoping to please I suppose. They took me away, to
the guardroom I suppose . . . The room was dark and full of people
hastening to and fro, malefactors, policemen, lawyers, priests and
journalists I suppose. (Three Novels 23)
It was a little the worse for wear, a little threadbare perhaps, but I was
glad to have it, yes, I suppose. Thanks I suppose, as the urchin said
when I picked up his marble, I don’t know why, I didn’t have to, and I
suppose he would have preferred to pick it up himself. (49)
When it first occurs in Moran’s narrative, it is as a completed thought, a more solid
supposition that has lost some of the indeterminacy of perception in progress: “I had
never seen any other messenger than Gaber nor any other agent than myself. But I
supposed we were not the only ones and Gaber must have supposed the same” (107).
In The Unnamable supposition is a mocking imitation of philosophical thought whose
original point of Cartesian certainty the novel insistently undercuts: “let us first
suppose, in order to get on a little (then we’ll suppose something else, in order to get
on a little further)” (313). Later, even this dubious progress is junked: “Am I to
suppose I am inhabited? I can’t suppose anything: I have to go on, that’s what I’m
doing, let others suppose. There must be others in other elsewheres, each one saying
to himself (when the moment comes, the moment to say it): ‘Let others suppose.’
And so on” (406-7).
In a blithe annexation that Beckett’s more careful readers might find rather off-
putting, the philosopher claims Beckett for himself, arguing that “Everything divides
into itself” is an example of the writer “at his Hegelian best” (Žižek, Sex 289). It is
not just that everything is divisible (Mao) but that everything divides into itself,
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becomes itself, through primordial division. Whether this is actually what Beckett
meant by “into itself” or if he was describing an infinite divisibility— Malone is at
this point pondering the division of time remaining to him—is, one suspects, not
particularly important to Žižek, who is forced to commit the heresy of paraphrase to
make his literary resource more amenable: “the unity lost through sundering
retroactively emerged through sundering itself, i.e., as Beckett put it, a thing divides
itself into one” (23). In the kind of slippage which Derrida could devote a book to
illuminating, “divides into itself” has become “divides itself into one,” thereby
assuring Beckett’s Hegelianism. Furthermore, “I suppose,” a Beckettian supplement
exceeding any philosophical appropriation, has been expunged.
There is no doubt that Beckett was familiar with Kant’s philosophy—he owned
the complete works and was familiar with Wilhelm Windleband’s commentary in the
latter’s History of Philosophy—and some attempts have been made to draw parallels
between the former’s “being of nothing” and the latter’s non-substantial
transcendental I, particularly with reference to those voices that enigmatically refer
to the abyssal “I, of whom I know nothing,” the “unthinkable last of all. Unnamable.
Last person. I,” the “I” that is (perhaps) distinct from the “somethingness,” the other
fictional and actualized entities (Company 24). For Žižek, however, the subject
undoubtedly “appears” but it does so through abstraction. But how does this subject
emerge in Beckett’s abstraction without being localized in a concrete situation?
Noting the lack of historical particularities in Malone Dies, Žižek muses that
by Georg Lukács’s standards, Beckett’s abstraction is “resolutely ‘anti-Marxist’”
(Sex 454). In Theory of the Novel, when Lukács mentions the abstraction that occurs
in literary form’s mediation of historical content, it is as a critical reprimand against
form’s detachment from concrete circumstances. Writing of the late stages of the
chivalrous form parodied in Don Quixote, he observes that it “had succumbed to the
fate of every epic that wants to maintain and perpetuate a form by purely formal
means after the transcendental conditions for its existence have already been
condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic. The chivalrous novel had lost its
roots in transcendent being, and the forms, which no longer had any immanent
function, withered away, became abstract” (101). Here, abstraction is not the
culmination of a conscious artistic program but a senile uncoupling from reality. In
Lukács’s The Historical Novel, the novel was the genre in which history, following
the mass participation in war, revolution and the nation state, was no longer an
abstract object that occurred elsewhere, an indistinct and dim backdrop to more focal
events, but instead became the unavoidable content that literary form houses.
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While Beckett’s treatment of historical content is not a modernist repetition of
what Hegel understood as Romantic forms without content, his apprehension of
history is nonetheless non-mimetic; the passage of abstraction between content and
form remains active and effective. In obliquely relating the horrors of the twentieth
century in Malone Dies, he constructs “an abstract form of de-contextualized terror”
or even “a Platonic Idea of terror” that, despite the commonsense requirement to do
justice to terror by discerning its iconic and procedural varieties, the concrete
particulars of Nazism and Stalinism, is “not only psychologically (a victim
experiences his situation as abstract), but also ontologically, with regard to social
totality itself, more truthful than a ‘concrete’ realist image of social totality” (Žižek,
Sex 454). Why is this “more truthful”? For Žižek, the great writers are timeless insofar
as they produce abstractions that are irreducible to their historical moment. This
extraction of terror from a concrete and recognizable Other is what permits its
continued effectiveness. It is only through a writing of abstraction that the anxiety
still caused in societies in which these concrete instances of terror are apparently
absent—societies in which, in concrete terms, we seem to be free—can be felt. We
are (comparatively) free and yet anxiety persists. The reason for this resides at the
condition of our being, the relation between the barred subject and barred substance.
This procedure is distinct from that of Camus. The Holocaust was unimaginable, an
event outside of history and only misrepresented by materialist statistics, and yet it
took place: “when abstraction sets to killing you, you’ve got to get busy with it” (The
Plague 228). Camus’s response was to exchange content, a metaphorical substitution
of holocaust for plague.
The formal transposition of lacks resulting from the “procedure of abstraction”
is finally achieved in Not I (which Žižek considers to be a staging of The Unnamable),
where subject and Other are reduced to a Mouth and an Auditor—the mute receiver
of the Mouth’s monologue who responds only by raising their arms and letting them
fall in an exaggerated shrug. Noting the trouble that Beckett had in arriving at a
suitable actualization of the Auditor on stage, Žižek, distinguishing his approach from
that of conventional “Beckettology” which has sought to resolve the enigma through
recourse to a synonymic visual archive, recognizing the Auditor in the old woman
who covers her ears in Caravaggio’s The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, argues
that the difficulty lies in actualizing the “structural place” of the gap in substance
without obscuring it with a particular substance (“Minimal Event” 304-05). As
Mouth’s monologue circles around some unspeakable trauma, each time she fails to
adequately narrativize and subjectivize it, culminating in indeterminacy and the
Auditor’s shrug: “what?… who?… no!… she!… [Pause and movement]” (Beckett,
Will Greenshields 173
Not I 382). The final effort, however, concludes differently: “what?… who?… no!…
she!… SHE!… [Pause]… What she was trying… what to try… no matter… keep
on… [Curtain starts down]” (383). An emphatic recognition (“SHE!”) does not elicit
the same gesture of helplessness (“movement”) from the Other and after the pause
there follows an articulation of stubborn resolution echoed in Worstward Ho!: “Ever
tried. Ever failed. No Matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (Nowhow On 101).
Here, the confrontation with originary trauma is distinct from Hölderlin’s rewriting
of Greek tragedy as Trauer-spiel (mourning-play) that depicts Empedocles’s suicide
as the only option in the face of exile from divine Oneness. Nor is it the point of
exhaustion—the subject, like Beckett, intends to “keep on” not despite a way’s
absence but because there is no prescribed or possible way (“No ‘I,’ no ‘have,’ no
‘being.’ . . . There’s no way to go on” [Shenker 148])—or the marriage of the form
of the “pure subject” with historical content. For its part, the Other is neither
exhausted nor a viable resource for subjectivization.
Of course, “[t]he best would be not to begin” (Beckett, Three Novels 294). In
the words of the Chorus in Oedipus at Colonus (which serve as the epigraph to the
second volume of Hyperion)—“Not to be born is, beyond all logos [λόγος], best; but
when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed
he should go back from where he came” (1124-27, trans. modified)—we can
recognize Hyperion’s longing for the always already lost Hellenic ideal or Molloy’s
rather more ignoble and shambolic return to the womb (as psychoanalytic critics had
it). The “reconciliation” in Not I is distinct from these “eccentric paths.” In the poetry
of anxiety, due to the leaky transcendental frame’s original failure, the narrativization
of trauma is impossible: the “best” is the Absolute knowing that takes place at the
moment of subjective destitution. Contrary to transcendental poetry, this “is not a
discovery of transcendence, but of the void obfuscated by the mirage of
transcendence” (Žižek, “Favourite Plays” n. pag.). While it is no less true that
literature and philosophy remain in “the age of the subject” inaugurated by Kant and
the Romantics, Žižekian Hegelianism finds in Beckett the subject as the name of a
pre-transcendental gap/rupture that, when in contact with the barred and yet
inexhaustible substance, realizes the chance to begin again (Less 6).
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176 Concentric 47.1 March 2021
About the Author Will Greenshields teaches English literature at Zhejiang University. He is the author of Writing
the Structures of the Subject: Lacan and Topology (Palgrave, 2017) and articles on
psychoanalysis and literary theory in journals such as the Oxford Literary Review, Textual
Practice and Nottingham French Studies.
[Received 24 June 2020; accepted 1 February 2021]