Updates

Sorry for me recent silence. I have been adding finishing touches to my book on Heidegger in preparation for shopping it around to publishers as well as finishing a paper or two. I have also almost finished reading Zizek's new book Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism while engaged in a reading group for the book involving a few philosophy colleagues and a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst. I may be sharing some thoughts on the book soon. I may also get back to some posts concerning both the Heidegger Circle and the Ancient Philosophy Society.

On a totally non-philosophical topic, a good friend of mine just self-published his first fiction book in collaboration with a friend of his, entitled Captain James Hook and the Curse of Peter Pan. It is a retelling of the story of Peter Pan from the perspective of Captain Hook. Should any of my readers be interested, and have some spare time aside from philosophical labors, it is available on Amazon as an e-book and through Lulu as a paper back.

On Zizek on Heidegger on Hegel

I recently read a new paper by Zizek on Heidegger's criticism of Hegel. The pdf can be downloaded here. Like much of Zizek's work, it is an impressive and exciting paper particularly in the way it clarifies and presents Lacan in relation to both Heidegger and Meillassoux. I suspect this paper is something of an opening volley in the battle to come with Zizek's publication of his magnum opus, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, in April of this year. Zizek has claimed that this century will come to be known as the Hegelian century and he no doubt hopes his book will be a major step in philosophy's recognition of this fact. It may be that one of the major things standing in the way of Zizek's Hegelian Return, at least on the Continental side of the issue, is the ongoing influence of Heidegger. Heidegger himself oriented his work, as he put it, on the front in opposition to Hegel and, I would claim, this opposition continued in one form or another throughout his career.

Zizek Assessing the Post-Hegelian Break

Creston Davis has posted on his blog Object Petit a Zizek's introduction to Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, edited by Zizek, Crockett, and Davis himself. The introduction is an interesting read mainly concerned with interpreting the way in which Hegelianism itself changed philosophy in such a way as to dismiss the idea that the very existence of post-Hegelianism is a counter argument to Hegel. It ends with the rallying call for us to attempt to read the difficult history of the twentieth century in a Hegelian manner and with the promise that the true time of Hegel will be the twenty-first century. This rather reminds me of Zizek's confession in a recent interview that he is working on a huge book about Hegel which he intends to be his magnum opus.

I think the part of the introduction that most struck me was this paragraph:

In what, then, resides Hegel’s uniqueness? Hegel’s thought stands for the moment of passage between philosophy as Master’s discourse, the philosophy of the One that totalizes the multiplicity, and anti-philosophy which asserts the Real that escapes the grasp of the One. On the one hand, he clearly breaks with the metaphysical logic of counting-for-One; on the other hand, he does not allow for any excess external to the field of notional representations. For Hegel, totalization-in-One always fails, the One is always-already in excess with regard to itself, it is itself the subversion of what it purports to achieve, and it is this tension internal to the One, this Two-ness which makes the One One and simultaneously dislocates it, it is this tension which is the movens of the “dialectical process.” In other words, Hegel effectively denies that there is no Real external to the network of notional representations (which is why he is regularly misread as “absolute idealist” in the sense of the self-enclosed circle of the totality of the Notion). However, the Real does not disappear here in the global self-relating play of symbolic representations; it returns with a vengeance as the immanent gap, obstacle, on account of which representations cannot ever totalize themselves, on account of which they are “non-all.”

Obviously, if you read my blog, you have seen that I have been reading and thinking a lot about Badiou recently. I am interested here in the way in which Zizek picks something out that may indeed be central to Hegel but presents it in a way which sounds far more like Badiou than Hegel.