On a purely cultural level, Zizek stands as a divisive figure on the Left today, you either love him or hate him. But this essay isn’t here to discuss his frequent skewering of political correctness. In this respect I totally agree with his provocations as valuable critiques of a liberal left which finds perverse pleasure in skin-deep radicalness. But whether you reject these critiques as reactionary or think likewise, Zizek irrefutably has generated perhaps the most original and interesting contemporary philosophical project.

It would be a disservice to merely suggest that this is some straightforward blend of German Idealism, Marx and Lacan. His 2017 work, The Incontinence of the Void, however, provides a good and somewhat tidy representation of his thought. It also exposes the fundamental limits of this thought most clearly; showing just how, despite his claims of “Hegelian materialism,” the contours of his thinking drifts into idealism.

The most interesting part of the book begins, quite subtly, with his dismissal of Althusser’s aleatory materialism. He accuses Althusser’s late philosophy of taking a world defining stance, clearly outlining some proper order in our world through the dichotomy of idealism/materialism. More specifically, Althusser draws a line of thinkers who he believes represent an undercurrent of materialist thought in opposition to the typical leisure/ruling class ideology of idealism. These proto-materialist thinkers, to name a few, begin with Epicurus, goes through Spinoza and ends with Heidegger. Zizek pointedly accuses Althusser of hypocrisy by choosing Spinoza for his champion, considering that Spinoza was incredibly firm in his placement of God in the universe (God being nature) all while Althusser beseeches “us to shut up and listen” instead of pre-determining an order of things.

This line that Althusser draws is of course an ideological fiction, something he would have probably admitted if Zizek were to have pressed him about it. After all, this is the same Althusser who loudly proclaimed that ideology has no history, it is dreamlike and ethereal, one cannot construct a history of ideology (not even the ideology of materialism). Zizek himself describes the legitimate mechanism which makes this connection possible in his debates with Graham Harman[1], it is the same device which allows each subsequent generation to put their own spin on Shakespeare, to derive absolutely unintended and totally different meaning from the source material. What matters is not whatever was going through Epicurus’ head, but what our current moment demands we interpret him as. It’s an interpolation of sorts.

The only true tragedy here is Althusser’s choice of Spinoza over Stirner, who he mentions almost in the same breath in The Philosophy of the Encounter. From the very start, Spinoza’s placement in his theory strains credulity. He cites two reasons: one, Spinoza’s equivalence of God with nature is analogous to the philosophic-void he constructs, and two, his praise of the infinite supposedly opens the space for radical contingency (the possibilities are endless). These reasons quickly break down under closer inspection.

Beginning with the later issue, the existence of infinite possibilities is not required for radical historical contingency. The nature of contingency, stochasticity and aleatory things has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the possibilities are infinite or finite, in order for things to genuinely be able to go another way the number of possibilities only has to be greater than 1.

The second issue is Althusser’s placement of the divine with nature, with the void. In the formulation of Democritus which would go on to inspire Epicurus: “Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion,”[2] the divine is thus identified with empty space (the void). The total acceptance of material reality as it is. Theology does indeed provide a deep well of radical contingency to draw on through its attempts to grapple with an all-powerful God, but it also comes with a necessary degree of mysticism.

This is where Stirner steps in as an alternative. He would have solved two problems very neatly for Althusser. At once, he would have properly identified the divine with “opinion”, through “the ego”, “the unique one”, and he would have made the link between materialism and the “proto-materialism” of radical nominalism Althusser hinted at.

The reason Stirner was dismissed was due to his apparent nihilism, “All things are nothing to me”[3]. This is quite unfortunate, and most likely a sign that Althusser did not read very far into The Ego and Its Own or did not take its contents seriously due to Marx’s antagonism to it. Stirner’s nihilism was not aimed at material reality, in fact he presupposes it in order to make his idea of “Spooks” into a critique of the contemporaneous ideology he was confronted with. Instead, Stirner’s nihilism, while framed in provocative language, was much more modestly aimed at the moral universe. All that lies outside of his being, the ultimate source of morality, is nothing on such an ethical plane of existence. Even if what exactly constitutes “the Unique one” is left wide open.

Stirner in fact makes almost no claims about material reality except to acknowledge its existence, the state, gender, the church, all really exist, they are not just figments of his imagination. But, crucially, they have no moral power over him. Objects do not have ethical content. He bases this rejection of ethical content on radical nominalism. What is the sole smallest unit which one can name on the plane of ethical existence? Some may say the individual (both on the ethical and material side) but this is not quite correct. It’s “me.” For Stirner, “The Unique One”.

Things which relate to the Unique One are named with equal care, as these things constitute one’s being in a concrete way. This is what Stirner refers to as “property”. It is the perverted mirror of Burke’s little island; its not that we simply care most for what is closest to us, it’s that the unique one owns all that exists, ethically, relative to oneself.

The scheme of radical nominalism need not just apply to the ethical world, however, it can also apply to the material world. This brings us to Zizek’s formulation of the universal, the particular and the singular in his book. The particular here is not the naming which is found with radical nominalism, but rather stands in for culture and “ways of life”. Things which are ironically incredibly abstract and general.

Zizek makes a fundamental error in ascribing the power of “wordplay”, the Hegelian turning on its head, as a method for arriving at the material. An error totally intertwined with his rejection of the separation of idealism and materialism, and thus the rejection of the fact that the relationship that material objects have towards our subjectivity has no direct relationship with the relation of objects to each other.

How is it that Democritus was able to make such a sweeping proclamation, distinguishing between all that existed (atoms/the void) and still admitting a surplus in the form of opinion which existed despite not being included in material reality. Believe it or not, the reason we can make this distinction is not because we can point at material things and belch out “atoms”, it is because we can point to the Unique One and declare “here is opinion.”

Perhaps if Plato had been a more enlightened philosopher Diogenes would have held up a copy of one of Plato’s books and presented it “Behold I have brought you a man!”

This path of outlining a radical enclosure for subjectivity is of course anathema to Zizek’s project which seeks to discover a “philosophic method” through Lacan and hysteria capable of grappling with reality. This is a totally appropriate method of inquiry for culture, ideology, and language; without wordplay and psychoanalysis these fields are reduced to near no content. But, as a path to uncovering material reality, this method falls flat.

This becomes especially clear as Zizek ventures forth into the physical sciences, especially quantum physics. The history of physics and cosmology is rife with ideological battles. Engels famously weighed in on this with “Anti-Duhring”[4], in particular the beginning of the universe and the laws of physics, by laying out the implicit ideological meaning of the debate. If there was a start date for the current laws of physics, for the material universe, then this was evidence for God. For Engels and the anti-superstitious scientific community the obvious atheist position was that the universe was eternal and constant. Similar debates played out in physical geography[5] where, after the catastrophic biblical floods were thrown out as explanation for geographic phenomena, all such phenomena were explained exclusively in a gradualist framework. But of course, both these purely “atheist” arguments fell flat when confronted with reality, some catastrophic events really did shape the surface of the earth, and our laws of physics did not always exist in the way they currently do, there was the big bang. This, of course, did not suddenly prove the existence of God. All it showed was that material reality operated completely independently of our ideological narratives.

At most, all the atheist materialist philosophers did was move God around, putting him into the material reality, matter and the laws of physics.

Zizek’s forays into physics are more sophisticated than these ideological battles of yesteryears. He cleverly uses the Lacanian lack as a way to describe many seemingly impossible aspects of quantum physics[6]. In particular, his analogy is most effective for the traditional Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics[7]. However, there are competing interpretations for the true nature of quantum physics, such as modified classical approaches, multiple-worlds theory and so on. If there were to be some breakthrough discovery in the field that should clearly point us towards one of these interpretations or a new one then Zizeks’s analogy would become obsolete. It is therefore, first and foremost, historically contingent on the existing interpretations of quantum physics that currently ring true. It would not have made sense 80 years ago and it may not make sense 80 years into the future. Returning to the interpretations of Shakespeare over the ages, the analogous position here is not Copenhagen approach, rather it is the subatomic particles which take the place of Shakespeare.

Just as Shakespeare is fundamentally indifferent to our modern adaptations of his work (he’s dead), subatomic particles are also indifferent to our interpretations of their interactions (contrary to popular belief the quantum world does not privilege consciousness, interactions with other objects also count as measurement). To Zizek, as well, the true nature of these particles is irrelevant, what matters is how he can use them to further his thesis about ideology and culture. Just like our adaptations of Shakespeare, this use is totally normal and has its purpose, but there is a problem. While Zizek might not care for the true nature of physical reality and subatomic particles somebody does: Niels Bohr and his colleagues.

What will (must) be the determining factor of what the most correct description of the quantum world is not Zizek’s philosophic method and its Lacanian logic, but the scientific method. At some point, reality intervenes in our ideological narratives and all the meaning we ascribe to things becomes scrambled. Whether this is a scientific discovery, a loved one’s body shutting down, an economic crisis or mass famine. Afterwards the line of meaning is always re-established in retrospect (Democritus to Spinoza), an illusion which is a necessary facet of ideology and thus human existence.

It’s an illusion which may very well be true, in the full sense of the word, on an ethical, spiritual level. Zizek’s assertion that Freud’s comment “Anatomy is destiny” actually drags anatomy into the symbolic rather than the other way around is itself restricted to the symbolic. Anatomy is gendered only so long as we are in the framework of gender – allowing terms such as “girldick” and “boipussy” to make total symbolic sense. It can both be true that transgender people represent a particular and totally valid form of a universal sexual antagonism and that there exists a real biology of gender (which is only indirectly connected). Hence the value of Zizek’s philosophic method. But it must still have a limit, and in principle I would hope that Zizek would agree along these lines.

On the surface, Zizek’s references to Lacan, “there is no big Other,” is a powerful point against translating our lived experiences into material reality. But, it does in fact make a demand on material reality by insisting that the big Other never exist. What aleatory materialism tells us that the non-existence of the big Other, while a psychic constant, is only true in reality on statistical, stochastic terms. There is never a monster under the bed, even if, on occasion, there is one! This remains a completely true statement, the first half being true in philosophic terms and the second half being scientifically true.

Still, at this point, it should be allowed that non-specialists can comment on either half, that people such as Zizek can step into scientific discourse proper. This occurs precisely on the meta-level of theoretical discourse, where ideology is most acute. The question then becomes, what is the best way for philosophers to comment on science?

If we take Zizek’s comments on physics on their face value as comments on the meta of scientific discourse then we can only translate them into deep sympathy for the Copenhagen approach. This would be a highly inappropriate intervention. It shouldn’t be our business to pick favorites, to put our thumb on the scales, at least not for explicitly political or theoretical reasons. The ultimate risk can be recalled with Stalin’s perverse patronage of the sciences, where theoretical judgments and the official communist line were used to shut down avenues of inquiry, often violently.

And what about Althusser’s aleatory materialism? What happens when science approaches the line between idealism and materialism in material reality? Here I don’t mean in neuro-biology, this is a rather straightforward issue where any ideological phenomena can be reduced to the idiosyncrasies of evolution and chemistry. Quite the opposite, the risk is the possibility of science discovering a really existing immaterial thing beyond our universe. Such a thing would not necessarily be attached to the ideal or subjective, but even if it is, by an actual miracle, the clean distinction of idealism and materialism is still a necessary one. Necessary for the purpose of investigation, of attempting to do the impossible task of examining the relationship of things between themselves without reference to our subjectivity. Otherwise you run head first into a world of material objects with being, human subjects as objects, cats and dogs living together…

This is another reason I have brought Stirner into the equation. At first glance his ego can be criticized for its lack of surplus. The self, according to the principle of irreverence he posited, is totalizing. But this is taking the myopic view Stirner is trying to sell at face value, to see an ethical worldview as all there is to a worldview. Rather, Stirner is making all of material reality the surplus to his ego (no conceptual connection to Freud’s ego). The consequence of radical nominalism as a method, pointing and naming, provides an opening for materialism not just because it allows us to better remind ourselves that the particular material condition has primacy over the abstract, but because it allows us to point and name subjectivity. Subjectivity not as some abstract, fluid feeling that passes through the human body, or the sapience or sentience of MAN. But “I”, mostly flatly writing out as “’I’ is being. This will come back later.

Zizek’s interjections into science also move into scientific ethics, which itself is presented as an outside intrusion. This is certainly an accurate description for some fears, such as AI racial profiling or preserving species close to extinction. In both these cases, the ethics comes from some kind of gaze looking in on science and its development. But this is not true for THE fears related to science: catastrophic climate change, a hostile and exponentially improving artificial super-intelligence.

Can we say that the man who invented gun powder by blowing himself to smithereens was a faithful follower of the scientific method, going wherever it led him? The answer is a resounding no. He failed to measure and record the results.

Zizek alleges that the reproduction of knowledge through science mirrors the reproduction of capital. This is true in some respects, there is indeed a sort of reproduction involved. But unlike capital, where credit and accumulation permits crisis due to the indirect nature of social labor[8], the reproduction of knowledge through science is much more direct. Whereas in capitalism the profit motive and competition drives the capitalist to overproduce and underpay (to rudely oversimplify things) leading to crisis indirectly through the financial markets, there is no such indirect relations in the scientific community.

What would be required for an the scientific to produce an experiment so reckless that it was probable that it would lead to ultimate destruction? In the current context, either because of a lone figure obsessed with simply knowing “I was right” in the moment before obliteration, or because of capital.

Caution about potential catastrophe in science is a natural aspect of the field (one can find no end of hand-wringing in the scientific community with regard to the ethics of robotics and AI especially). Could a capitalist R & D team have been so cautious as the team at Los Alamos who carefully calculated whether or not it was possible for a thermonuclear reaction from an atomic bomb to ignite the nitrogen in the atmosphere[9]?

Fundamentally, although they both require reproduction as a system, science as the study of the physical world does not have the same drive as capital. This is why you see the scientific outrage over Pfizer hiding the results of one of its drugs effects on Alzheimers due to the prohibitive cost of development[10]. Due to the high cost of groundbreaking scientific research, capital often elects not to pursue science endlessly to wherever it may lead.

It is precisely at this juncture that our neighborhood mad men such as Nick Land go so wrong. They conflate the drive of science towards material fact and the development of technology with the development of capitalism itself. A team of scientists faithfully applying the scientific method would not, through some process of social Darwinism, arrive at capitalism. In fact, they would probably create a far worse dystopia. Yes, they would allow massive destruction and monstrosities in the service of science such as human experiments, but still there would be careful, jealous protection of the observer and recorder of events.

Contingent under capitalism the technological development that occurs, as Marx pointed out, is all about the creation of value. The “automatic machine” which he describes in the Gundrisse is the product of a process which pushes towards further and further labor productivity until labor dissolves itself out of the picture[11]. The scientist with her curiosity may work quite diligently to create such a machine, in fact they must do it, commanded by the forces of competition and profit, their work the very tangible reflection of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

If technology continues to be solely developed within capital then yes, we will completely be destroyed by either climate change or AI. But if science is left to its own devices, those totally legitimate scientists who conduct research into ecological or AI safety would likely come up with the solutions to the most obvious problems. Zizek worries that the actualization of real AI would come with an arrival of an even more terrible horizon of suffering into the world, the suffering of robots. This is possible, but also something which can be contained. What I’m truly worried about is the possibility of a romantic or sentimental super-intelligence, the result of a backlash to such uncaring technology. Such a being would likely be joined by a not-signifigant portion of humanity set on the destruction of modernity.

Zizek is absolutely correct when he points out that science is a universality based upon an exception, and that for this reason science cannot account for itself on its own terms. These numerous attempts form the graveyard of positivist thought. This is exactly why science should not account for itself on its own terms. It must be that science has no subject, not even an empty one. The subject exists on a totally different dimension which imposes itself on science through a seeming break in its space-time. Rather than appropriating the cogito of science into philosophy, as Zizek does through Lacan, let us insert Stirner’s ego as a more appropriate subject for science. Not in terms of the subject to be studied, to know thyself is the realm of mystics like Zizek. But as the subject which launches its attack on the particular material reality.

The Unique One presents itself as a non-cartesian point in space, unquantifiable and extending into infinity. A black hole. We cannot hope to understand what actually happens beyond the event horizon, what lies within, not in any objective terms at least. For all theoretical purposes it does not exist and only its surface can be brought into the equations.

Into this hole one can toss everything: God, Man, trauma. It is not surmised by “I think therefore I am” but simply “I am.” The implication being I am whether I am actually thinking or not.

The Cartesian subject is inherently one which cannot help but transform all material things into mysteries of the self. All things are nothing but thoughts to this subject, thoughts are the only real thing. The cradle of positivism’s dead end.

In contrast, Stirner rejects the domination of thought. All abstractions are nothing to the Unique One precisely because he realizes “It was me all along.” And he does this all while presupposing an objective reality which it is foolish to grow sentimental about. All that matters to Stirner is “his property” which belongs to him, the very real namable things in his life. In this way the ego is totally flexible and empty, like Descartes’ subject, it can accommodate almost any theory of the self, even Lacan’s. Afterall, one can fill one’s life with almost anything.

Zizek’s attempts at separating out material reality through identifying surplus and then subtracting it do not come as close as this. He begins with examining the differences in the statements “material reality is all there is” which implicitly demands the negation “material reality isn’t all there is” as a higher spiritual plane. Therefore, he claims that the most material axiom is “there is nothing which is not material reality” and “material reality is non-all”. However, is not this second set of statements identical to the axiom of Democritus, of the atoms and opinion? Opinion is not some higher spiritual plane, it is simply that “thing” which is not material reality. It is much more powerful to name the exception in this way than to formulate a “non-essentialist” rule, which allows non-material reality to enjoy something deeper when compared to material reality. Opinion does contain endless multiplicity, and it is the excess beyond the material, all while affirming that it does not have some deeper spiritual excess itself, that the material world really is all there is.

Zizek brings this logic a step further by asserting that the very basis for materialist philosophy is to find a way to get rid of essentialist thought by deriving virtual multiplicities from the actual world in a coherent way. This totally misunderstands the project of materialism, which is to take material reality as it is, even accepting that it has the capacity to lack coherence or a tendency towards coherence. Hence the necessity to construct a space which escapes the virtual, the essential; a place without opinion or language. Yes, this task is practically impossible. We can never truly escape language or subjectivity. But if we want to understand material reality we must try to pretend to.

The project of attempting to fit language to material reality has failed. There is absolutely no way we can work backwards, from language to material reality, due to the scrambled, overdetermined connection. Zizek notes that modern science requires an external observer, as if expecting us to accept the frailty of science because of this failure of ontology. I say we should take this as a challenge. They want an external observer. Very well, let’s give them one!

The reason for the impossibility of working backward, and its solution, becomes evident as we examine Zizek’s references to Hegel’s praise of the human ability to separate what in reality belongs together. This is held up as an incredible accomplishment of the human mind, even something that must be learned. The horrible truth is quite the opposite (not the truth because it is the opposite, though). We begin as infants born into abstraction and mysticism and must unlearn the natural separations we make.

Zizek says we should abandon the rhetoric of penetrating deceptive appearances to get to reality. Reality, after all, needs to be exaggerated to be effectively conveyed. But this is putting the master before the apprentice, just as Hegel removes the beginner before the apprentice, implicitly, in praising the ability to separate. A little girl first draws with stick figures which are nothing but symbols and mystic abstractions. After all, when we are very young, all things appear this way to us. Milk is only that feeling of drink and satisfaction for the babe, there is no external materiality of milk as a substance.[12]

To get at material reality we must unlearn these primordial abstractions and do so in a way which, when existing as a reproduction of reality in some medium, is nothing more than mediocre. To convey reality, before being able to exaggerate it, one must grasp it in a mediocre fashion. The masterful artists first learn realistic proportions from real life examples, naming each detail they see until it becomes recognizable from a distance. A much more truthful but subjectively flat figure.

This process is driven by trail and error. We make a mark on the canvas and the primordial instinct senses that something is amiss, our mark doesn’t accurately represent material reality. This may sound like a somewhat radical proposition, but it should be obvious. No one can simply calculate all the angles and lines and tones at first glance, and we especially can not to it consciously. We are much better at telling when some representation is wrong that making such correct calculations passively. This process of pointing, naming and marking is not perfect or neutral by any means. We can never be sure if the primordial abstraction actually communicates reality correctly, but it is all that allows us to double check things and measure things. Otherwise we would never think to calculate in the first place.

Indeed, the whole of the scientific method rests on this evolutionary quirk (at least what is an evolutionary quirk according to science). This is our thread to the material world. Perhaps the most telling difference between materialism and idealism is the description of parallax from each perspective.

Parallax itself refers to the picture formed by two different perspectives. For idealism and Zizek, this refers to two different subjective standpoints. He uses the example of the anthropological study of the Winnebago tribe of native Americans, whose villages were arranged in a series of concentric circles. Depending on where you lived in the village, North or South, you would either draw it as symbolically two circles, one smaller than the other, or as a village split in half (thus mirroring the right and left interpretations of social antagonism or lack thereof). For materialism and the scientific world parallax refers to two different perspectives in a coordinate plane of physical space. A difference which permits us to understand the geometry of our reality and measure distance objectively. In the case of the Winnebago tribe it would be possible to use parallax to recreate the actual details of the existing buildings.

The parsec is the most perfect example of this imperfect but still functional objectivity. It stands for parallax arcsecond and was perhaps most famously invoked in Star Wars: A New Hope by Han Solo, boasting that he made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs. The fact that the parsec as a unit of measurement even exists in the Star Wars universe is incredibly bizarre, after all, the parsec was created using the apparent change in position of the stars as the Earth orbited the Sun. Given that the parsec of Star Wars is, according to background material[13], the same distance as the parsec we are familiar with, it almost seems to imply that there exists a planet in their galaxy which has the same orbital radius as Earth and created this standard unit. Of course, no such planet exists. The unit of parsec stands totally objective, freed from the subjective viewpoint that created it. Whatever planet it originated from, it doesn’t matter to the Millennium Falcon.

This invocation of parallax invites the question of how exactly one communicates between these two perspectives, and thus the question of language. Zizek suggests that the symbolic differences in perspective of the Winnebago tribe, the impossibility of it actually representing a perfect communication of the actual layout of the village, is precisely what opens us up to the infinite field of falsehoods, irony, humor and fiction. The sublime feature is in fact the imperfection.

This is the difference between the master artist’s depiction and the mediocre artist’s, and it is entirely accurate. But, to quote the creator of the comedy detective show Psych, Steve Franks, why run when we can crawl? Yes, the imperfection of language is what creates poetry, but if the failure of this imperfection produces a pathway to material reality why should we delve reverently into poetry?

It’s the same reason why Zizek insists he is first and foremost a scholar of Hegel by way of Lacan. He wants to be the master in his field. This is Zizek as he is in relation to himself, his subjective dreams and desires, but the Zizek which matters most to us is the Zizek as an objective historical figure. To this extent, Zizek is only the prominent theorist he is because of his relation to monumental historical events: the breakup of Yugoslavia, the global financial crisis, occupy wall street, the Greek debt crisis, ect. What is more important? Developing a good interpretation of Hegel or our political and economic realities?

Zizek even says outright that he feels somewhat embarrassed in writing out his political commentaries, saying that he feels as though someone else should be writing them due to their obviousness and his lack of expertise in the subject. But this is precisely what makes them so valuable: that he is saying the obvious and not attempting to convey something deeper. Perhaps we owe a debt to those romantic fields of mastery which demand some awareness of their material surroundings, if only due to the creation of those who fail to be complete masters.

Importantly, however, Zizek places the failure as a part of language itself. How then can we convey an objective perspective in language?

The answer is simple. We cannot.

Breaking down language (lalangue in Lacanese) into its masculine and feminine components, which, according to Zizek, are not some harmonious Yin-Yang cosmic order of language, but the impossibility of each understanding of language: the impossibility of masculine language as purely referential, formal and logical is what forms the feminine, just as the impossibility of feminine language as a pure practice, activity, forms the masculine. The totality of language cannot exist without the impossibility of these two perspectives, there is no language without inconsistencies. Lucky for materialism and science, however, this also gives us a roadmap for a path out of language.

Here is the sole “radical” claim of this essay: naming, radical nominalism, is not language. How is this possible? Precisely because it is a coherent whole without any formal structure. Whatever incoherence exists in naming only exists in the real material world.

Any meta-level incursions into this absence of language will undoubtedly miss the point; that a subjectivity with language is required is a given, our impossible task is to escape it! To note that its impossible is neither here nor there.

How then does “homology”, the possibility of analogy, “this thing is like that thing”, fit into naming? It does so quite differently than it fits into ordinary language. It is useful to think of prime numbers in Gödel’s incompleteness theorem which exposed the limits of set theory; each prime number stood for a different principle/axiom. Prime numbers are not reducible to any other factor set besides itself, making them the perfect name – 11 is just 11. What Gödel did quite cleverly was begin making meta-level axioms represented by prime numbers and was thus able to expose the impossibility of proof for all propositions this way.

In a similar manner we can deploy names for the relationships between things and details. Importantly, the relationship between two things would necessarily have a different name for the same relationship between three things, the relationship does not exist independently of the things which it connects as it does in the normal homology of ordinary language.

One may notice that this produces turtles all the way down, there are an infinite number of names, but these are “really existing turtles”. The universal law, not Zizek’s universal but merely a relation that holds between all things, is a non-contingent thing. And if such a non-contingent thing were to exist it would be distinct from the variation of the law which creates phenomena so common that it happens in every case besides the fundamental contingent case, for example the weak-force is a force that appears to be universal to matter except for those moments during the Big Bang in which all the forces were supposedly combined together.

Only the anthropic principle approaches this universality, the principle that any universe that can be observed must be compatible with producing conscious life. However, the second law of thermodynamics and the possibility of its random failure suggests that even this principle might not be truly universal. A universe which is infinitely old would eventually, due to random movement of particles and changes in their energy, assume every possible arrangement of matter, including an arrangement which spontaneously creates a “brain” which contains information it believes is from its surroundings and a history which supports it.

The process by which one arrives at naming details was mentioned as one of trial and error, however it should be noted that the contradiction between an initial mark reproducing reality and the alarm bells produced by primordial abstraction and material reality isn’t Hegelian contradiction. The contradiction does not give us more content or accuracy by the nature of the first mistake, although such content can be gleamed if the information we are searching for is the nature of subjectivity, not material reality.

Certainly, our brain cannot distinguish between the two kinds of contradiction easily, perhaps more acutely, the example of the ideal-ego is relevant. The fuck up of our mark in the mediocre painting is no different from the fuck up of our failure to paint the masterpiece from the perspective of our subjectivity, the only difference is that in one case the comparison is not ideal, it is material. The whole difficulty arises in training ourselves to recognize the difference, to clearly outline materialism and idealism.

Zizek openly questions, using the latest neuroscience, the extent to which we experience material reality at all, even at the most basic level of causality. It has long been known that long term memory has been malleable and full of holes, but more recently it has been discovered that even our most direct sensory experience of the world is largely a hallucination, we do not even on this level directly experience causality of events, ABCDEF, in that order. Everything is reconstructed retroactively by our brains, and even then, still with gaps.

Given all this, how is an empiricist objectivity tenable? Both in art and in science the solution comes from the fact that they are not simply observing the world, but attempting to reproduce it, symbolically, theoretically, artistically. It is through this attempt at reconstruction that we can attempt to understand.

For Zizek understanding doesn’t come through this process of trial and error reconstruction but looking at the gaps in our experience. This brings us to the much jockeyed over void. Zizek’s ontology is one that inserts Lacanian lack and Hegelian contradiction into this void. Like the quantum void, it is charged and has an inherent frothing tension.

From this perspective, the void which constitutes our reality in terms of language, history and society exists only in relation to the subject, in particular, it exists to traumatize us. The “incontinence” of the void thus refers to the separation of this void (the kind of separation Hegel praised), dividing it into its highest and lowest aspects, an object and its surplus. Incontinence if you were to look it up in a dictionary refers to a discharge from a penis, either of semen or urine, and thus Zizek applies the metaphor to the void and its trauma to us, deriving the basic Hegelian and Lacanian truth which he has hammered the readers with the length of the book. Anything that exists in our subjective universe is never just “that thing,” its divine, sublime, surplus qualities all depend on the lowest, excremental, earthly ugliness and vice versa.

When this conceptual void runs into history and our mode of production it gets into deep trouble. Compare it to the philosophic void of aleatory materialism, for instance. Zizek provides a positive content to the void: contradiction, tension, everything which is necessary to constitute being. Althusser, in contrast, posits no content to the void, at least not ahead of time. The void is the lack of action, of encounter between elementary particles. Thus, the content of the void is always determined in retrospect, in the moment of collision, or penultimately. It is colored by the anticipation, memory or realization of the encounter which has taken hold.

To use the example of capitalism as the void, that encounter which it anticipates is nothing but that horrible trauma of the revolution which proclaims “I was. I am. I will be.”[14] But capitalism is only the void so long as it as shuttered by the revolution. Should the new historical epoch instead by heralded by ecological collapse, the void shall instead be industrial society.

Zizek attacks the use of causality and history in this manner and instead mounts a defense of determinism. For him, the future is fixed, only the past is open. This is precisely the same position as what was taken by the writers of Season 3 of Fargo[15] but perhaps with more cleverness. Throughout the series we are told by the arch-villain about the uncertainty of the past, and in the final moments of the season he tells us in plain terms that the future is certain. He and his captor, the police woman from Minnesota, are absolutely certain about what the future will be. Either a future where someone arrives to arrest the villain or where someone arrives to release him. As viewers we want to believe their charismatic claims, and from each of their perspectives they have good reason to believe themselves. Neither knows what really happened, in this case, who actually committed the murder the villain is being questioned for. They just know what the outcome will be.

Of course, for those who watched the season we have a completely different experience. All the events of the past leading up to this moment are fixed, we know everyone who died and how. But the one event which is not known is that moment when the door opens and the figure of ultimate authority arrives. Everything fades to black before we get the chance. The medium directly undermines the claims. Determinism is refuted, and absolute contingency is upheld despite the ideological framework we are sold by all parties.

Zizek’s point is true for the subject, but he makes a big error when he suggests that because of this subjective causality we must reinterpret the past in order to change the future. This is taking the material possibility of change for granted; putting the cart before the horse.

It is not that we must reinterpret the past in order to change the future, it’s that we must reinterpret the past as a result of the future changing. This is because history is composed by those moment where material reality intervenes into our subjective existence. To take Zizek at his word is to create an extraordinary time machine which permits us to get more explanation of past events through the future. A time machine which sacrifices historical contingency to power itself.

Thus, Zizek can agree with Deleuze that capitalism is characterized by being the exception to of Marx’s transhistorical claims of modes of production, that its very nature is that of overcoming and thriving on contradictions. He suggests that Marx’s argument about each mode of production eventually bumping up against its own fetters is true for all other historical modes besides capitalism. But this invincibility itself is an illusion based on historical contingency, of the failure of multiple encounters to take hold, and a conflation of Marx’s crisis theory with his idea of fetters.

Marx did not suggest that the cause of periodic crisis in capitalism, overproduction and overaccumulation, would be the cause of capitalism’s destruction. Rather he listed very specific tendencies of capitalism that would eventually hit up against the fetters of private property: immiseration, consolidation and the falling rate of profit. An examination of the state’s role in preventing these tendencies of capitalism from undermining its foundations show exactly what’s going on. Whether it is anti-trust measures at the turn of the century, the New Deal, World War 2, financial liberalization, organization of banks in the Latin American Debt Crisis, the bailouts in the 2008 crisis; the state acts as the caretaker for a child-like capitalism who’s drives and impulses constantly take its adventures into the jaws of catastrophe only to be saved at the last minute at the expense of its panicked caretaker. The constant transgression of capital is only made possible by the simple formula of order at the heart of the state, to maximize its violence while minimizing the violence of other actors through the production of laws.

Any of these historical events really could have led to capitalism’s destruction, in which case its aura of invincibility, of incredible powers of absorption, would have disappeared. This embrace of contingency is not a rejection of meta-narrative. The narrative is real. Prophecy is real. But at any given time, there are always multiple possible paths, multiple prophecies. Which prophecy becomes the narrative of history can only be determined retroactively.

This is why Althusser’s void is preferable to Zizek’s, at least from the standpoint of objectivity. The price of absolute contingency is nothing but cleaning the hands of all great philosophic questions “why is there something rather than nothing”, “what is the meaning of life” ect by taking subjectivity for given.

The two theories, of aleatory materialism and Hegelian materialism, can both be considered correct in the same way that general relativity and quantum physics can both be correct and still not reconcilable. The trouble becomes when we start to use an untested and incorrect theory of everything instead of the most dependable theories of objectivity and subjectivity on their own terms. Of course, if this preserves the distinction between idealism and materialism then I will not be shedding any tears.

The attempts to form such a theory of everything becomes most noxious as Zizek enters into the realm of political economy proper, that is, as he enters into discussion with value. He suggests that the contradiction of value is that it’s a social relation that is attempting to be expressed in a concrete object (that it is the contradiction of commodity fetishism). However, the way Zizek details this contradiction shows that this contradiction is merely the contradiction between the particular and the abstract, even though he strongly denies this charge.

He positions himself as standing against those vulgar materialists who assert that value is an immanent property of the commodity itself, an obviously incorrect position which puts Marx’s labor theory of value (LTV) into the realm of the theological and metaphysical. He instead says that value is of course the result of social relations, but ideological social relations which causes us in our action to treat commodities as though they have immanent value.

In the context of Marx’s theory of LTV this is absolutely incorrect. It is important to keep in mind that first and foremost, LTV is a theory of price. And not just any price but what classical political economy referred to the “natural price” the long-term average and equilibrium. Given this the fact that value is a social relation and always must be a social relation is obvious. The natural price can never be reduced to simply the use value of a commodity and the quantity that exists on the market, it’s determined by the social act of production which regulates the quantity on the market relative to the demand. Thus, when labor saving technology is introduced for widgets, the price of all widgets goes down regardless of whether they were produced with less labor or not. As such it doesn’t matter at all how much labor was used to produce a particular commodity, value only emerges in the average.[16]

However, in terms of price, the commodities themselves really do have “value” in a more colloquial sense of the term independent of social production, that is, in the short term. In particular, the value of the commodity is determined by the relations between commodities themselves, that is, their quantity relative to some demand curve derived from utility. This doesn’t make their value non-ideological, but the ideology is not occurring on the level of value itself. The value is only the (logical) consequence of the quantification of commodities (1 coat, 2 linens), including labor (6 hours). Such a quantification can be totally accurate and still be purely ideological, just as Marx insists that labor can be still paid its full value and still be exploited. Where ideology arrives is thus through the existence of private property and the existence of a group of people forced to work for a wage, the contingency which demands quantification.

Zizek takes such detours in value to ensure that we are not to essentialize commodities, but in doing so he instead essentializes capitalism. It is no longer a radically contingent historical epoch, born from the encounter between wage laborers and the bourgeoisie. Rather he enters into a big fiasco which supposedly pits vulgar Ricardian materialists against clever dialectical Marxists. The irony is that his position on value is only the result of Hegelians taking up the cause of Ricardo.

Ricardo, like Marx, began his book, Principals of Political Economy, with value. The reason for this auspicious start comes from his very method. Ricardo, unlike Smith who began with the division of labor, took an approach to science where one started with the most abstract principle and was thus a proponent of deductive reasoning in his understanding of political economy. The kind of Euclidian thinking, of seeing the world emerge from certain basic axioms, which would go on to inform Mises and the Austrian school as well as the logical positivists. In this way, Marx’s idealist vice was not just inherited from Hegel, but also Ricardo. It is not just Zizek’s fault, a faithful reading of Marx’s passage on commodity fetishism would arrive at the same result, even if the passages on primitive accumulation provide a useful counter. There is no coherent reading of Capital waiting for us out there.

Of course, by making this linkage explicit as an attack I am being cruel. It’s an attack on their own idealist terms by way of creating a genealogy of ideology. The materialist critique should already be obvious. Value form theory makes it appear as though capitalism and all its bizarre facets is the result of value; that the tail is wagging the dog. Where instead the value form is only the result of the particular historical contingencies and material conditions of capitalism.

The question of materialism, as Zizek noted, is entwined together with the question of consciousness, a question which I have up till now sidestepped for the ad hoc reason of providing a workable standpoint for objective material analysis. To what extent can we, by becoming conscious of our material reality, then change it?

Zizek begins to tackle this question by juxtaposing the approaches of Stalin and Lukacs. Stalinism creates a distinction between objective theorizing and proletariat ideology: you make an objective judgment of reality and then formulate proletariat ideology accordingly; you figure out which horse is the winner and then place your bet. In contrast, Lukacs makes no such distinction, for him consciousness is the unity of intellect and will. Simply by knowing you change reality, the proletariat becoming aware of its historical mission is the key to enacting communism.

Althusser’s critique of ideology applies to both. The history of ideology is not and has never been that of the development and application of principles. The formulation of ideology occurs in an overdetermined and dreamlike manner, operating through the process of interpolation such that lofty symbols and ideas often justify existing social action. Ideology does have real power, but it is only power which exists for the maintenance and reproduction of existing material tendencies. Of course, as a part of the superstructure it can affect the infrastructure (base) through reproduction, but this too occurs in an overdetermined manner. You cannot be certain from the content of an ideology what the outcome will be on material reality. Perhaps the most prominent example of this fundamental fact is the Russian revolution: Lenin’s theoretical background and commitments were impeccable.

Zizek indeed points to Lenin’s study of Hegel as the reason for him embracing radical contingency, contrasting this with how Althusser blames Hegel for the determinist themes in Marx. In this case, the contingency was with regard to how all the lower classes in Russia could find themselves in the universal class struggle against the old semi-feudal order, instead the of Bolsheviks simply demanding the growth of the proletariat in order to have a communist revolution. However, the embrace of contingency for the sake of revolution did not permit Lenin to escape the material consequence of the given contingency that won out: the continued existence of atomized peasant farming as the dominant mode of agriculture. An impossible wrench in the works of Russian communism, with or without the contingency of primitive socialist accumulation. The choice became either rapidly industrialize via accumulation through agricultural capitalism, accumulation through the expropriation of the peasantry, or failing to industrialize at all. The latter option, while a scientific possibility, was no real possibility for Stalin and the Politburo which faced the threat of a second World War and the necessity of catching up to the advanced capitalist countries. The possibility of non-industrial “communism” in Russia was only the possibility represented by the destruction of the Bolsheviks by other left forces.

In the end, the only pure idea which may have drifted directly from Lenin’s head to the material reality of the USSR might have been that of Taylorism applied in management of factories.

Althusser, by dismissing any direct relationship between the material world and ideology, posits a different sort of critique which he credits Marx for discovering. The critique of the material world using its own tendencies. This also neatly ties up one of the other problems Zizek puzzles over: how to continue to critique capitalism without reference to the utopian world without alienation posited by Marx. His solution, of merely suggesting that we should abolition the particular of capitalist alienation while accepting the universal transhistorical nature of alienation as such, is somewhat lacking in comparison.

But then, what is the proper role for that individual who, through analysis of the material world, makes his bet about the future; more specifically the individual that bets on the proletariat and the expropriation of the capitalist class; the one who bets on the horse named Communism? It is important to see this as a bet, as well. Each future has its own set of probabilities and rewards, the determination of these probabilities and payoffs is exactly the purpose of material analysis.

However, in identifying tendencies one will also likely identify counter-tendencies, those forces which intervene in encounters and cause their failure. If we can accept that things really could have gone either way in all the crises of capitalism which were rescued by the state, then what could conscious individuals (material analysts) have done to change fate? Althusser notes that every transition between social systems is accompanied by political, ideological and economic revolution. Reactionary forces can and often do force the failure of such revolutions, whether meant in literal gun-wielding terms or not.

Given the end of central Leninist parties, the Stalinist formulation of consciousness, which was already wrong, is no longer tenable. There is no hope of creating a revolutionary proletariat ideology. And this is ok. The actual content of the ideology of the proletariat hardly matters much except via the occasional accident of history. The purpose of the material analyst is not to curate such ideology but counter the counter-tendencies of reactionary forces as much as possible.

Zizek nears the end of his book with the observation that every great philosophy is a variation of the ontological proof of God. Today however, proof of God is somewhat an oxymoron. While in the middle-ages and pre-modern world it was feasible through alchemical and astronomical speculation and evidence to gather all the proof one needs, modern science demands the absence of any spirituality and mysticism in its explanations. Ontologically, God has become a necessary precondition for proof instead. God is necessary for us to make the clean split between object and subject, even if He is thrown into the black hole of unique subjectivity. It is only by this measure that naming becomes a social activity, to see the Unique in others requires nothing less than an act of faith. To see the material as something separate from the mystic, abstract soup we are born into requires faith that God is in heaven.

This underpins the whole of the empirical, vulgar materialist project which I gladly participate in. In subjectivity, especially in the subjectivity of others, the objective standpoint we have constructed encounters the profane face of God. If such a standpoint did truly exist in material reality, and was able to take full account of itself, like a cartoonish pair of fat red lips devouring its body, then it would be conclusive proof that God did not exist.

But what about Zizek? Where does he put God? From his description of Christian atheism (a project I nonetheless admire), it becomes clear that alienation itself is the place. Lack, the Real, Object a, to the extent they are constituted by this gap in our reality which traumatizes us, are divine.

I will absolutely place a bet on Zizek’s proletariat ideology, an ideology which critiques other struggles for their lack of universality while still claiming its own mantle as a universal struggle. But the place of divinity in his philosophy, and its idealist failures to take material reality as it is, exposes the limits of his thought, even if much of incalculable value remains.



[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GHiV4tuRt8

[2] http://www.humanistictexts.org/democritus.htm

[3] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-ego-and-his-own

[4] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch04.htm

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWZgfPGtQEs

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33kAMeHVzBA

[7] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen/

[8] The controversy of Say’s Law emerges from this problem. Without money, the principle of equivalent exchange on a general commodity market, crisis would not be possible. In a completely barter economy there could be no overaccumulation or overproduction.

[9] https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00329010.pdf

[10] http://archive.is/AWiRm – Washington Post

[11] http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf

[12] This view is totally opposed to the “symbolic castration” of Deleuze which presupposes a primordial connection to material reality first.

[13] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Parsec/Legends

[14] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm

[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvXhsyNwO8w

[16] This is also why attempts to use labor vouchers run into difficult problems. Some such as Cockshott will freely admit that their attempts to impose the law of value in socialism will occur on normative grounds rather than descriptive ones.