24,656
edits
Changes
no edit summary
=def==
KANT (see also ANTIGONE/MEDEA, DERRIDA, HEGEL)
The Kantian "transcendental' critique is absolutely crucial to Žižek,
and he draws on it throughout his work. As Žižek writes. summariz-
ing Kant's contribution to the history of philosophy: "On the one
hand, the notion of the transcendental constitution of reality involves
the loss of a direct naïve empiricist approach to reality; on the other
hand, it involves the prohibition of metaphysics, that is, of an alb
encompassing world-view providing the noumenal structure of the
universe" (p. 167). And yet at the same time Žižek entirely agrees with
Hegels argument that Kant himself misunderstood the nature of his
breakthrough, that it is necessary to read Kant against or beyond
himself. It is this that Hegel represents for Žižek: not an opposítion to
Kant or even a simple surpassing of him, but a certain drawing out of
consequences that are only implicit in him. As against the distinction
between the noumenal and phenomenal in Kant, we can say that the
'shift from Kant to Hegel ... [is] from the tension between immanence
and transcendence to the minimal difference gap in immanence itself
. . . Hegel is thus not external to Kant: the problem with Kant was that
he effected the shift but was not able, for structural reasons, to
formulate it explicitly" (p. 236). In this regard, Kant becomes increas-
ingly identined for Žižek with a certain 'masculine' logic of uni-
versality and its exception (St), while Hegel represents a "feminine
logic of the not-all in which there is nothing outside of phenomenal
appearances but appearance is not all there is, precisely because
of its ability to be marked as such (S). Zižek even goes on to compare
Kant's noumenal phenomenal split to Derrida's ethics of 'Otherness
and with Antigone's sacrifice of all things for one thing, as opposed
to Hegel's truly modern ethics, in which even this cause itself must
be sacrinced.
