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René Descartes

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I would like to conclude by gesturing towards how Žižek’s criticism of the Cartesian ''cogito'' feeds into his analysis of the complicity between [[radical evil]] and [[nationalism]]. In “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!”, the final chapter of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', Žižek claims that nationalism is a privileged form of radical evil. For Kant, radical evil consists in elevating sensuous or particular maxims (e.g. of self, wealth, ethnicity, religion, class and nation) over the universal law of reason. The fanatical nationalist presumes to have made phenomenal contact with the Good, and then proceeds to elevate this phenomenal object to the dignity of the Thing. Of course, from Žižek’s Lacanian perspective, limitation precedes transcendence, and thus the nationalist’s presumption to know the Good (in the form of the nation) is the epistemological equivalent to the pre-Cartesian philosopher’s presumption to know the Soul. Following Kant, Žižek is able to denounce this as a radically evil act of nationalist mystification. Yet, the question remains, does not the Lacanian settlement of the problem of finitude amount to the same hypostatization of the subject of doubt, only this time in the form of the barred or inaccessible subject of desire? In other words, does he not substitute an illusory object of his own in the place hollowed out by the Real – call it the cogito, the Thing that thinks, the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' or, indeed, the nation? Given Hegel’s profound mediation in Žižek’s Cartesian itinerary, if limitation precedes transcendence, then the obverse or Hegelian side of this injunction is that transcendence precedes limitation, which is one way of reading Žižek’s prescription for the absent centre of political ontology. The psychoanalytic cure consists in traversing the fantasy to its limit, and thus in revealing the void called subject that lies at its extimate centre. Žižek repeats Kant’s critical turn by following Lacan’s trajectory from a theoretical unveiling of the subject of desire to an ethical praxis that remains haunted by the spectre of the Cartesian cogito.
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]

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