Žižek’s Return to the Idealist Subject: Beckett, the ...

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


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?


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


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,


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


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


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?


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”


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


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


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


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


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:


[. . .] 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


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


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


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


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


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


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,


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.


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,


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).

Works Cited Badiou, Alain. “Bodies, Languages[,] Truths.” 9 Sept. 2006, Victoria College of Arts,

University of Melbourne. Lacan.com, EBSCO Publishing, n.d.,

www.lacan.com/badbodies.htm. Accessed 12 July 2019.


—. Handbook of Inaesthetics. 1998. Translated by Alberto Toscano, Stanford UP,

2005.

Beckett, Samuel. Company. Calder, 1980.

—. Murphy. Calder, 1963.

—. Not I, The Complete Dramatic Works. Faber, 2003.

—. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable. Calder, 1959.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.

Boxall, Peter. “Nothing of Value: Reading Beckett’s Negativity.” Beckett and

Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett, edited by Daniela Caselli, Manchester

UP, pp. 28-47.

Camus, Albert. The Plague. 1947. Translated by Stuart Gilbert, Hamish Hamilton,

1948.

Deleuze, Gilles. “The Exhausted.” 1992. Translated by Anthony Uhlmann.

SubStance, vol. 24, no. 3, 1995, pp. 3-28.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

1972. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Continuum,

2004.

Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Power: Essential Works of Foucault

1954-1984, Vol. 3, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley et

al., Penguin Classics, 2002, pp. 326-64.

Gibson, Andrew. Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Oxford UP, 2006.

Harman, Graham. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary

Criticism.” New Literary History, vol. 43, no. 2, 2012, pp. 183-203.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. 1807. Translated by A. V. Miller, revised

ed., Oxford UP, 1977.

—. Science of Logic. 1812, 1813, 1816. Translated by A. V. Miller, George Allen &

Unwin, 1969.

Hölderlin, Friedrich. Hyperion and Selected Poems. Edited by Eric L. Santner,

Continuum, 1990.

Johnston, Adrian. A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical

Materialism. Columbia UP, 2018.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. 1788. Translated by Mary Gregor,

Cambridge UP, 1997.

Krell, David Farrell. The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of

God. Indiana UP, 2005.

Lacan, Jacques. Autres écrits. Seuil, 2001.


—. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety 1962-1963. 2004. Edited by

Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Adrian Price, Polity, 2016.

—. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the

Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973. 1975. Edited by Jacques-Alain

Miller, translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton, 1999.

Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the

Forms of Great Epic Literature. 1920. Translated by Anna Bostock, MIT P,

1971.

McGowan, Todd. “The Bankruptcy of Historicism: Introducing Disruption into

Literary Studies.” Sbriglia, pp. 89-106.

Ruda, Frank. “Idealism without Idealism: Badiou’s Materialist Renaissance.”

Angelaki, vol. 19, no. 1, 2014, 83-98.

Sbriglia, Russell, editor. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature

but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek. Duke UP, 2017.

Schlegel, Friedrich von. Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Peter Firchow, U

of Minnesota P, 1991.

Shenker, Israel. “An Interview with Samuel Beckett.” Samuel Beckett: The Critical

Heritage, edited by L. Graver and R. Federman, Routledge, 1979, pp. 146-49.

Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus. Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, n.d.,

www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collections. Accessed 7 Oct. 2019.

Toscano, Alberto. “Materialism without Matter: Abstraction, Absence and Social

Form.” Textual Practice, vol. 28, no. 7, 2014, 1221-40.

Žižek, Slavoj, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical

Materialism. Verso, 2014.

—. “Burned by the Sun.” Lacan: The Silent Partners, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Verso,

2006, pp. 217-30.

—. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso,

2012

—. “The Minimal Event: Subjective Destitution in Shakespeare and Beckett.”

Sbriglia, pp. 290-318.

—. Sex and the Failed Absolute, Bloomsbury, 2020.

—. Interview by Liza Thompson. “Slavoj Žižek on His Favourite Plays.” Five Books,

Five Books, 2016, fivebooks.com/best-books/slavoj-zizek-favourite-plays/.

Accessed 24 Aug. 2019.

—. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Verso, 2000.


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]

Žižek’s Return to the Idealist Subject: Beckett, the ...

Documents

Transcript of Žižek’s Return to the Idealist Subject: Beckett, the ...