Slavoj Žižek: Catastrophe Creation and Spectral Materialism

Having entered into the empty territory of fears, he passed before those who were stripped by forgetfulness, being both knowledge and perfection, proclaiming the things that are in the heart of the vastation, the great emptiness and apophatic kenoma, so that he became the wisdom of those who have received instruction in the negation of negation.
………– Valentinus, 2nd Century Gnostic

The frustrating nature of our human existence, the very fact that our lives are forever out of joint, marked by a traumatic imbalance, is what propels us towards permanent creativity.
………– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

The Gnostics provide innovative and oftentimes disturbing interpretations of the creation stories they read in the Hebrew scrolls of Genesis. Unlike their Christian rivals they read this unique work in reverse, providing an exegesis that enabled the universe of process and change we see around us as the handiwork not of some supreme Being (God), but rather as the botched and catastrophic bungling and error of an inferior Demiurge.  They concluded that a distinction, often a dualistic distinction, must be made between the acosmic, spiritual deity, who is surrounded by aeons and is all wisdom and light, and the creator of the world, who is at best incompetent and at worst malevolent. Yet through everything, they maintained, a spark of transcendent knowledge, wisdom, and light persists within people who are in the know. The acosmic deity is the source of that enlightened life and light. The meaning of the creation drama, when properly understood, is that human beings—gnostics in particular—derive their knowledge and light not from the transcendent acosmic god, but through the mean-spirited actions of the demiurge, the creator of this world, wherein they have been confined and imprisoned. (The platonic aspects of this imagery are apparent.) Humans in this world are imprisoned, asleep, drunken, fallen, ignorant. They need to subtract themselves from the catastrophic trauma and consequences of the Real—to be freed, awakened, made sober, raised, and enlightened. In other words, they need to return to the gnosis of the spectral materialism of the gap just beyond the self-lacerating “night of the world”.1

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head—there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful.
…….– Hegel, The Night of the World

It is my contention that the life’s work and philosophy of Slavoj Žižek with its notion following Lacan of the Real as the catastrophic and traumatic origins of the Gap, or the open and incomplete realm out of which our freedom, our self-positing transcendental subjectivity as self-relating nothingness emerges as from the gap, crack, and torn ruins of Being is central to his speculative stance. Yet, unlike the gnostics (i.e., neo-Platonists, Western Buddhists, etc.) Žižek’s good news does not affirm or offer a return to the One (God) Absolute, but rather returns us to the disjunctive (unconscious) knowledge of the Real and of our place ripped out of the “system of the world,” our freedom as self-positing autonomous beings oscillating between the Symbolic Order and the Real, subtraction and sublimation. The world is a place devoid of divinity or substance-as-One, neither a pantheistic harmonious whole, nor some infinite substratum of force and will in the sense of Spinozism, that would resolve all tensions and ambiguities, obstacles and traumatic dualisms into the Order of Things as one with Substance as God. Against such totalistic reductions Žižek’s great work is to return us to our “freedom,” to the truth of our incompleteness and the openness of the universe within which void, time, and being all interoperate in a dialectical and dynamic ongoing creation.

The highest form of ideology does not involve getting caught in ideological spectrality, forgetting about real people and their relations, but precisely in overlooking this Real of spectrality and in pretending to address directly “real people with their real problems.”
………– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

If catastrophe and fall are at the origins of substance and subject, then it is the play between the Symbolic and the Real which is the interminable nexus of our sorrow and our hopes of freedom. As Joseph Carew will suggest one of the key principles of Žižek’s ontology: freedom is not a raw, brute fact, but depends upon the caustic collapse of the vital fold of being, a brisure in the heart of the Real; the chaotic aggregate of ghastly forms that constitutes the zero-level of human freedom represents an ontological catastrophe, a catastrophe that is synonymous with the subject itself: “it designates […] the primordial Big Bang, the violent self-contrast by means of which the balance and inner peace of the Void of which mystics speak are perturbed, thrown out of joint.”2 (OC, p. 133)

This pre-synthetic “multitude” is what Hegel describes as the “night of the world,” as the “unruliness” of the subject’s abyssal freedom which violently explodes reality into a dispersed floating of membra disjecta.
……– Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject

Žižek’s goal is the gnosis of freedom and autonomy, the de-naturalization of subjectivity against any and all forms of deterministic reduction to naturalist or scientific forms of determinism. The irreducibility of the Subject to its deterministic origins is the cause of this traumatic rupture in Being. Caught between an Idealism of inner freedom and autonomy, and a spectral materialism of the gap we shift among the ruins of being like lost travelers in search of a lost object of desire.

[Freud’s] proto-ontological domain of drives is not simply “nature,” but the spectral domain of the not yet fully constituted reality.
……– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

Against the One the vanishing mediator emerged out of the Real. It was a great wonder that they were in the empty place of power without knowing it and that they were able to exist on their own, since they were not able to contain its excess and know its intelligence, for indeed its intellect had come forth from the Real and inscribed itself within the Symbolic Order through the very “magical” gap of their oscillating subjectivity. For it revealed its knowledge as non-knowledge in all its immediacy, namely, the unconscious knowledge of the living powers of thinking revealed to all beings at last by its virtuality, displaying to them that these are not merely capacities or powers, so that one may know them and think of something as void alone, but as Subject as well. These are the linguistic traces that convey the truth of a spectral materialism. They are enunciated only when they are known in self-enunciation against the impossible terror of the Real. Each Subject is a imperfect truth like a imperfect book, for they are signs written by the hand of difference as repetition, since the Subject wrote them for the concrete beings, so that they by means of its powers of repetition might come to know themselves as the vanishing mediators between the Symbolic and the Real.

The real Ground of Existence is impenetrable, dense, inert, yet at the same time spectral, “irreal,” ontologically not fully constituted, while Existence is ideal, yet at the same time, in contrast to the Ground, fully “real,” fully existent.
……– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

How to Think Substance, Subject/System, and Freedom

How, then, are we to think substance and subject/system and freedom if we are to retain the spontaneity first brought to light, albeit for the most part formally, by Kant? For Žižek, the answer is clear: “[t]he passage from the Spinozan One qua the neutral medium/container of its modes [to] the One’s inherent gap is the very passage from Substance to Subject.”2 Yet, as Carew suggests the recognition of this gap has to be intrinsically traumatic, terrifying—it demonstrates a radical shift in our understanding of the world as some sort of harmonious cosmos that holds itself together in its infinite rational majesty to a world that, lacking totalizing order, must be predicated upon disruption and upheaval; a catastrophe creation full of discord, antagonistic and hostile to human and non-human alike. (OC, p. 126)

[T]he question crops up sooner or later: what is the status of the uncanny X that precedes the transcendentally constituted reality? F. W. J. Schelling gave the most detailed account of this X in his notion of the Ground of Existence—of that which “in God Himself is not yet God”: the “divine madness,” the obscure pre-ontological domain of “drives,” the pre-logical Real that forever remains the elusive Ground of Reason that can never be grasped “as such,” merely glimpsed in the very gesture of its withdrawal.
– Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject

Speaking of Schelling’s “ages of the world” treatises Žižek will remark that a whole new universe is disclosed here: the universe of pre-logical drives, the dark “ground of Being” which dwells even in the heart of God as that which is “in God more than God himself.” For the first time in the history of human thought, the origin of Evil is located not in humanity’s Fall from God, but in a split in the heart of God himself.3 In fact he’ll supplement this saying,

In Schelling, the ultimate figure of Evil is not Spirit as opposed to Nature, but Spirit directly materialized in Nature as un-natural, as a monstrous distortion of natural order, from evil spirits and vampires to monstrous products of technological manipulations (clones, etc.). (LTN, KL 471)

What else would this Spirit of Evil be but our old friend, the Demiurge of the Neo-Platonists and their pessimistic inheritors and revisionists, the Gnostics? In fact Žižek by way of German Idealist tradition seeking to recover a spectral materialism as the kernel of a secular gnosis at the core of this tradition will remind us of the poet Hölderlin’s starting point in the gap between (the impossible return to) the traditional organic unity and the modern reflexive freedom: we are, as finite, discursive, self-conscious subjects cast out of oneness with the whole of being to which we nevertheless long to return, yet without sacrificing our independence— how are we to overcome this gap? His answer is what he calls the “eccentric path”: the split between substance and subjectivity, Being and reflection, is insurmountable, and the only reconciliation possible is a narrative one, that of the subject telling the story of his endless oscillation between the two poles. (LTN, KL 532-536) The poet Schiller believed that in the subject’s integration into the organic substantial order— free selfhood could wholly appear in beautiful nature and art; while Schlegel asserted the force of subjectivity as the constant unsettling of any substantial harmony. (LTN, KL 547)

It is all too easy to “unmask” such a “substance,” to show, by means of a phenomenological genesis, how it gradually becomes “reified” and sedimented: the problem is that the presupposition of such a spectral or virtual substance is in a way co-substantial with being-human— those who are unable to relate to it as such, those who directly subjectivize it, are called psychotics.
……– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

The oscillation between the Symbolic and Real is at the heart of Žižek’s dialectic. Žižek describes that in our moment there are main positions which, together, constitute today’s ideologico-philosophical field: first, the two sides of what Badiou appropriately baptized “democratic materialism”: (1) scientific naturalism (brain sciences, Darwinism …), and (2) discursive historicism (Foucault, deconstruction …); then, the two sides of the spiritualist reaction to it: (3) New Age “Western Buddhism,” and (4) the thought of transcendental finitude (culminating in Heidegger). These four positions form a kind of Greimasian square along the two axes of ahistorical versus historical thought and of materialism versus spiritualism. The thesis of Žižek;s book is double: (1) there is a dimension missed by all four, that of a pre-transcendental gap/ rupture, the Freudian name for which is the drive; (2) this dimension designates the very core of modern subjectivity. (LTN, KL 354-359)

Žižek returns us to Plato’s revolutionary philosophy where the notion of the gap emerged: the assertion of the gap between the spatio-temporal order of reality in its eternal movement of generation and corruption, and the “eternal” order of Ideas— the notion that empirical reality can “participate” in an eternal Idea, that an eternal Idea can shine through it, appear in it. Where Plato got it wrong is in his ontologization of Ideas (strictly homologous to Descartes’s ontologization of the cogito), as if Ideas form another, even more substantial and stable order of “true” reality. What Plato was not ready (or, rather, able) to accept was the thoroughly virtual, “immaterial” (or, rather, “insubstantial”) status of Ideas: like sense-events in Deleuze’s ontology, Ideas have no causality of their own; they are virtual entities generated by spatio-temporal material processes. (LTN, KL 935-941)

In the opposition between the spectral appearance of the sexualized body and the repulsive body in decay, it is the spectral appearance which is the Real, while the decaying body is merely reality— that to which we take recourse in order to avoid the deadly fascination of the Real as it threatens to draw us into its vortex of jouissance. A “raw” Platonism would claim here that only the beautiful body fully materializes the Idea, and that a body in material decay simply falls away from its Idea, is no longer its faithful copy.
……– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

Rather than a realism of substantial Ideas, Žižek formulates a thesis of the virtual, “immaterial,” and insubstantial core of a spectral materialism in which Ideas arise from within the Real. This important revision of Plato leads us to an alternate conclusion about appearance and reality: implicit lesson of Plato is not that everything is appearance, that it is not possible to draw a clear line of separation between appearance and reality (that would have meant the victory of sophism), but that essence is “appearance as appearance,” that essence appears in contrast to appearance within appearance; that the distinction between appearance and essence has to be inscribed into appearance itself. (LTN, KL 966-969) That the phenomenal and its eidos are the unified elaboration of the concrete universal (Hegel) is behind the oscillations between Symbolic and Real that is mediated by the Gap as Subject. As he’ll explain in detail:

There is not just the interplay of appearances, there is a Real— this Real, however, is not the inaccessible Thing, but the gap which prevents our access to it, the “rock” of the antagonism which distorts our view of the perceived object through a partial perspective. The “truth” is thus not the “real” state of things, accessed by a “direct” view of the object without any perspectival distortion, but the very Real of the antagonism which causes the perspectival distortion itself. Again, the site of truth is not the way “things really are in themselves,” beyond perspectival distortion, but the very gap or passage which separates one perspective from another, the gap (in this case, social antagonism) which makes the two perspectives radically incommensurable. The “Real as impossible” is the cause of the impossibility of our ever attaining the “neutral” non-perspectival view of the object. There is a truth, and not everything is relative— but this truth is the truth of the perspectival distortion as such, not a truth distorted by the partial view from a one-sided perspective. (LTN, KL 1201-1209)

The ultimate battle from the beginnings of philosophy is between the Sophists who sought to keep the gap between the Symbolic and the Real open and incomplete, and the philosophers following Parmenides and Plato who sought to close the gap between “thinking and being” in a totalistic system. As Žižek remarks the irony of the history of philosophy is that the line of philosophers who struggle against the sophistic temptation ends with Hegel, the “last philosopher,” who, in a way, is also the ultimate sophist, embracing the self-referential play of the symbolic with no external support of its truth. For Hegel, there is truth, but it is immanent to the symbolic process— the truth is measured not by an external standard, but by the “pragmatic contradiction,” the inner (in) consistency of the discursive process, the gap between the enunciated content and its position of enunciation. (LTN, KL 1958-1962) This is Hegel’s idealism.

German Idealism and the Modern Subject

Hegel’s reproach to Kant is that he is too gentle with things: he locates antinomies in the limitation of our reason, instead of locating them in things themselves, that is, instead of conceiving reality-in-itself as cracked and antinomic.
……– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

For  Žižek German Idealism introduced and conceptualized two features of our current understanding of the modern subject. The notion that the subject is the power of “spontaneous” (i.e., autonomous, starting-in-itself, irreducible to a prior cause) synthetic activity, the force of unification, of bringing together the manifold of sensuous data we are bombarded with into a unified representation of objects. Secondly, that the subject is the power of negativity, of introducing a gap/ cut into the given-immediate substantial unity; it is the power of differentiating, of “abstracting,” tearing apart and treating as self-sufficient what in reality is part of an organic unity. (LTN, KL 2681-2589) As he explicates it:

In order to truly understand German Idealism, it is crucial to think these two features not only together (as two aspects of one and the same activity— i.e., the subject first tears apart natural unity then brings the membra disjecta together into a new [his own “subjective”] unity), but as stricto sensu identical: the synthetic activity itself introduces a gap/ difference into substantial reality; likewise the differentiation itself consists in imposing a unity. (LTN, 2581-2589)

One might see this as the dialectical “union” of system and freedom: it
demonstrates the heterodox character of Žižek’s appropriation of the
tradition insofar as he proclaims that its real truth has always been this
disjunctive, parallax relationship between the two terms of disjunction and synthesis; and, second, it demonstrates that Žižek’s own specific take on its unconscious Grundlogik in German Idealism is grounded in an extremely coherent reading of the stakes at play in post-Kantian philosophy, even if these have been drastically reformatted along the way according to a perceived and unrealized textual possibility. (OC, p. 126)

We can clarify— if not to resolve— this dilemma by introducing some further distinctions into the notion of “noumenal” freedom itself. Upon a closer look, it becomes evident that, for Kant, discipline and education do not directly work on our animal nature, forging it into human individuality: as Kant points out, animals cannot be properly educated, since their behavior is already predestined by their instincts. What this means is that, paradoxically, in order to be educated into freedom (qua moral autonomy and self-responsibility), I already have to be free in a sense much more radical, “noumenal,” monstrous even. The Freudian name for this monstrous freedom is, again, the death drive.
……– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

In the mythology of Valentinus the Gnostic we discover the notion that Adam, the first man, Image of the Anthropos, terrified the angels because they realized that a greater power of freedom of self-positing than they themselves possessed belonged to this mortal being. Because of this the angels in terror rapidly hid and botched their work, our cosmos, thereby bringing about both the creation and fall into time. Žižek in discussion of Hegel will ask: Is not the dialectical process the temporal deployment of an eternal set of potentialities, which is why the Hegelian System is a self-enclosed set of necessary passages? Answering: “This mirage of overwhelming evidence dissipates, however, the moment we fully take into account the radical retroactivity of the dialectical process: the process of becoming is not in itself necessary, but is the becoming (the gradual contingent emergence) of necessity itself. This is also (among other things) what “to conceive substance as subject” means: the subject as the Void, the Nothingness of self-relating negativity, is the very nihil out of which every new figure emerges; in other words, every dialectical passage or reversal is a passage in which the new figure emerges ex nihilo and retroactively posits or creates its necessity.” (LTN, 5395-5402)

Is not this obstinacy that persists even beyond death freedom— the death drive — at its most elementary? Instead of condemning it, should we not rather celebrate it as the last resort of our resistance?
……– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

The movement between Void and Self-positing freedom is both produced by the gap, and produces the gap as a retroactive necessity of its very freedom. Fate and Freedom seem to revolve or oscillate on a Mobius strip between the Symbolic and the Real as two modalities of the Subject’s negotiations with neither the side of the equation every gain total mastery over the other.  The political ramifications of this come out in Fabio Vighi’s On Žižek’s Dialectics: Surplus, Subtraction, Sublimation where in describing the break or rupture between on Symbolic Order and its reconstitution lies the gap in which we “traverse the fantasy” between the Symbolic and the Real. During this time-between-times one notices a form of subtraction, or as Vighi remarks, a “wiping of the slate clean,” along with the Hegelian “negation of negation,” or the creative effort to a symbolic restructuring.4 He compare it to both Freud’s psychoanalytical “working through” of the analytical process, as well as Lacan’s “traversing the fantasy”. In another register of the epistemological as the “evacuation of knowledge,” followed by hard work of the “transformation of this tabula rasa into a new” Symbolic Order. (OZD, p. 129)

Toward a Spectral Materialism of the Gap

The first act of creation is thus the emptying of the space, the creating of Nothing (in Freudian terms, the death drive and creative sublimation are intricately linked).
……– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

Ultimately its in the passage, this traversing of the fantasy between the disjunctive collapse of one Symbolic Order and its reconstruction from the pre-Symbolic in the Real that the spectral materialism of the Gap emerges as the fulcrum of this process:

Žižek’s materialism is based on the groundbreaking insight that the gap is constitutive of reality is nothing but the gap constitutive of subjectivity: we are the very impossibility that we ascribe to external  reality, and that we must constantly disavow or displace if we are to connect with it. The very surplus generated by our attempt to grasp the meaning of the world is both what prevents us from fully grasping it and what allows us to engage with it in its material guise. A material world, that is, emerges through a short-circuiting of inconsistencies: it is the some what “magical” product of the disavowed encounter between our lack to ourselves and the external reality’s radical openness. The strictly speaking virtual coincidence of these two lacks “miraculously” engenders material reality, with all its social, political and economic features. For reality to emerge, then, what is needs to be disavowed is precisely the “gaping knowledge” that our activity is always-already included in the complexity of external reality, thus opening it to our intervention and interpretation. (OZD, p. 133)

This sense of a “magical” and “miraculous” movement between two lacks and their interoperative consilience in the virtual gap as potentialities giving birth to material reality resolves itself in an open and incomplete ontology based on the catastrophe creation at the origins of our temporal movement out of the Real: the abyssal gap itself as fulcrum and vanishing mediator. Some may be critical of such religious and inexplicable us of terminology as magic and miracles which cannot be reduced to logical synthesis as truth, but the point of Vighi’s argument is that it is by way of subtraction that “we need to get in touch with our own disavowed matter, or unconscious knowledge, insofar as it was always responsible for the emergence of reality” (OZD, pp. 134-135).

Perhaps this gives us a minimal definition of materialism: the irreducible distance between the two vacuums.
……– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

It’s this sense of secular gnosis guided between two lacks that sparks the release and emergence of an (un)knowing and (non-)knowledge hidden from view both within and without, intrinsic/extrinsic aligns itself to a more-than-rational knowing that is both “magical” and “miraculous” not in some religious sense but rather in a sense of wonder that accepts the openness and incompleteness of our lives and the world. As Vighi will describe it what “we have here is therefore a reflexive determination of the overarching logic governing Žižek’s dialectical materialism, insofar as it is centered on the abyssal gap or parallax between subtraction and sublimation. Ultimately, this parallax is also the deadlock that characterizes the dialectical sequence from its very inception, namely subtraction. (OZD, p. 134)”

Is not the Epicurean notion of the clinamen the first philosophical model of this structure of the double vacuum, of the idea that an entity only is insofar as it “comes too late” with regard to itself, to its own identity?
……– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

As Žižek concludes Spectral Materialism of which Democritus is the progenitor arrives at den (subtraction) by leaving out only me from meh’den (“not-one”) and thus creating a totally artificial word den. Den is thus not nothing without “no,” not a thing, but an othing, a something but still within the domain of nothing, like an ontological living dead, a spectral nothing-appearing-as-something. The rise of den is thus strictly homologous to that of objet a which, according to Lacan, emerges when the two lacks (of the subject and of the Other) coincide, that is, when alienation is followed by separation: den is the “indivisible remainder” of the signifying process of double negation— something like Sygne de Coûfontaine’s tic, this minimal eppur si muove which survives her utter Versagung (renunciation). The later reception of Democritus, of course, immediately “renormalized” den by way of ontologizing it: den becomes a positive One, atoms are now entities in the empty space, no longer spectral “othings”( less-than-nothings). (LTN, KL 1522-1527) Instead of the positive atoms of historical materialisms false history we should realign the ancient atomistic philosophy with its updated form of dialectical materialism’s spectral nothings, those vacuous actualities of withdrawn objects lost within the dormancy of their volcanic cores, split and violent powers at the heart of the Real, along with the vanishing mediator in the gap between the Symbolic Order of Culture and this strange and uncanny realm of the Real with its violence and catastrophic traumas.

Therein lies the basic lesson of the failure of traditional Ideologie-Kritik: knowing is not enough, one can know what one is doing and still go ahead and do it. The reason is that such knowledge operates under the condition of its fetishistic disavowal: one knows, but one does not really believe what one knows. This insight led Dupuy to propose a radical solution: since one believes only when the catastrophe has really occurred (by which time it is too late to act), one must project oneself into the aftermath of the catastrophe, confer on the catastrophe the reality of something which has already taken place.
……– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

In that sense the End of Capitalism is an activity we are all participating in even now, even as we disavow any knowledge of our participation, even if we do not believe what we know is in fact the very truth of this catastrophe, because we are the ones who will suffer it, live it, belong to it, and who have foreseen its aftermath. Out of its ruins we shall also build a new world from the traumatic catastrophes of this act and event. As Žižek admonishes us the communist horizon is peopled by two millennia of failed radical egalitarian rebellions from Spartacus onwards— yes, they were all lost causes, but, as G. K. Chesterton put it in his What’s Wrong with the World, “the lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world.” (LTN, KL 22519)

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1. (2011-10-18). The Gnostic Bible: Revised and Expanded Edition (pp. 2-3). Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition.
2. Carew, Joseph. Ontological Catastrophe: Zizek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism (New Metaphysics). (Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, October 29, 2014)
3. Zizek, Slavoj (2012-04-30). Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Kindle Locations 467-470). Norton. Kindle Edition.
4. Fabio Vighi’s On Žižek’s Dialectics: Surplus, Subtraction, Sublimation. (Continuum, 2010)