The Trait of Oneness: Foundations of Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian Hegel

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی- پژوهشی

نویسنده

دانشجوی دکتری فلسفه، دانشگاه سودرتوم، سوئد.

10.22034/jpiut.2025.21102

چکیده

The article treats some underlying motifs of Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Hegel, according to which Hegelian dialectic and the Lacanian “logic of the signifier” are homologous. After a brief conceptual-historical contextualisation of Žižek’s Hegel against the backdrop of early twentieth century Hegelianism (Lukács, Kojéve), the article attends to some programmatic remarks in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Žižek’s first English-language book. There, he for the first time presents a Hegel of constitutive antagonism, contrary to prevalent readings of Hegel as a thinker of final resolution. Žižek nevertheless provides his most systematic account of Hegel, including the 2012 tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, in the Sublime Object’s sequel, for they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991). The majority of the article therefore deals with the initial chapter of for they know not, where we encounter the foundations of Žižek’s specifically Lacanian Hegel. The latter holds accountable theoretical currents such as negative dialectic and deconstruction for insufficiently rigorous readings of key Hegelian categories, not least that of identity. Instead of entailing a conceptual imperialism that swallows difference within itself, Hegelian identity is by Žižek read against the background of Lacan’s account of structuralist differentiality. What comes to the fore here is the question of the self-identical One, whose qualitative manifestation in The Science of Logic’s “Doctrine of Being” Žižek casts in terms of the Lacanian trait unaire (unary trait), that is, the nascent form of the signifier.

کلیدواژه‌ها

عنوان مقاله [English]

The Trait of Oneness: Foundations of Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian Hegel

نویسنده [English]

  • Payam Masarrat
PhD Candidate Philosophy, Södertörn University, Sweden.
چکیده [English]

The article treats some underlying motifs of Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Hegel, according to which Hegelian dialectic and the Lacanian “logic of the signifier” are homologous. After a brief conceptual-historical contextualisation of Žižek’s Hegel against the backdrop of early twentieth century Hegelianism (Lukács, Kojéve), the article attends to some programmatic remarks in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Žižek’s first English-language book. There, he for the first time presents a Hegel of constitutive antagonism, contrary to prevalent readings of Hegel as a thinker of final resolution. Žižek nevertheless provides his most systematic account of Hegel, including the 2012 tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, in the Sublime Object’s sequel, for they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991). The majority of the article therefore deals with the initial chapter of for they know not, where we encounter the foundations of Žižek’s specifically Lacanian Hegel. The latter holds accountable theoretical currents such as negative dialectic and deconstruction for insufficiently rigorous readings of key Hegelian categories, not least that of identity. Instead of entailing a conceptual imperialism that swallows difference within itself, Hegelian identity is by Žižek read against the background of Lacan’s account of structuralist differentiality. What comes to the fore here is the question of the self-identical One, whose qualitative manifestation in The Science of Logic’s “Doctrine of Being” Žižek casts in terms of the Lacanian trait unaire (unary trait), that is, the nascent form of the signifier.

کلیدواژه‌ها [English]

  • Žižek
  • Hegel
  • Lacan
  • Identity
  • Unary Trait
  • Signifier

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