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→In the work of Slavoj Žižek
Freud will usually say that he has no use for philosophy, which is in no “position to tell you anything serviceable of the relation between body and mind or to provide you with a key to an understanding of possible disturbances of the mental function” (''[[Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis]]'', ''SE'' XV: 20). What he is interested in is the particular. That is at the heart of his rejection of the popular “dream books” (''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]'', ''SE'' IV: 97–9): instead of decoding the dream according to universal equivalences, the analyst needs to look for the “residues of the day”, those traces of the specific and complex contingencies of a life that make psychoanalysis into something like a science of biography. ''[[The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality]]'' some five years later (''SE'' VII: 123–245) will extend this focus on contingency to the drives themselves, whose aims and objects are similarly contingent and incalculable in advance. Drive, as Žižek will insist repeatedly (e.g. ''LA'': 32, 37; ''TS'': 293; ''PV'': 110; ''LN'': 495–6), is even the name for this perpetual discord. “It is here”, Žižek suggests, “that we should perhaps look for the basic premise of the Freudian theory of culture” (''LA'': 37).
And it is here, again, that we meet philosophy on this point of excess. Th e The remnants of the day and the discord of drive are for Žižek versions of the Hegelian refrain, “The Spirit is a bone”, that runs through his work (e.g. ''SO'': 207–12; ''TN'': 34–5, 51, 62, 85; ''TS'': 88–9, 92–3; ''OB'': 143; ''PV'': 5, 33, 77, 84; ''ET'': 26). Following this logic of the general in the particular and the genus in the species, we could say that (1) the subject is the contingent; (2) but this is nonsense, there is an absolute contradiction between the two terms; and (3) that very contradiction is precisely the subject (see, for example, ''ET'': 534).We could say something similar of the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy: it is not that they are just versions of each other, at heart saying the same thing, but that in the deep and insistent contradictions between them each finds that extimacy of what is in it more than it. Freud is a thinker of the Real, and in that an anti-philosopher in the same sense as Lacan: “Not ‘I am not a philosopher’, but ‘I am a not-philosopher’, that is, I stand for the excessive core of philosophy itself, for what is in philosophy more than philosophy” (''PV'': 389).
For Žižek, as for Badiou, “The basic motif of anti-philosophy is the assertion of a pure presence (the Real Life of society for [[Karl Marx|Marx]], Existence for [[Søren Kierkegaard|Kierkegaard]], Will for [[Schopenhauer]] and [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], etc.), irreducible to and excessive with regard to the network of philosophical concepts or representations” (''LN'': 841). Žižek finds in Freud that concern with the figure of rupture and event that runs through [[Walter Benjamin|Benjamin]] to [[Badiou]]. The Freudian subject is one whose time is out of joint with itself, and that exists only in this inconsistency (''LN'': 380), shot through with those chips of what Benjamin calls Messianic time (Benjamin 1973: 254– 5). We see this in the much-debated “''Wo es war, soll ich werden''” of the ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', and which Žižek along with Lacan translates as “Where it was, I shall come into being” (Freud, ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', SE XXII: 80; Žižek uses this translation in the editorial description of books in Verso’s ''Wo Es War'' series, which he edits): one clause is in the past tense and the other in the future, as if that “it” and “I” were out of phase with each other. In the same lectures, Freud famously suggests that “One gets an impression that a man’s love and a woman’s are a phase apart psychologically” (''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', SE XXII: 134). But Freud’s is an incomplete anti-philosophy, for he cannot think the radical exteriority of trauma (ET: 295) and thus its purely political dimension. Žižek finds that dimension in Lacan’s claim to replace Freudian energetics with political economy (''PV'': 50), and in his insistence on the matheme as Real.
