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=Influences=
==Hegel==
What is crucial to recognize here-for it is a motif that runs throughout Žižek's oeuvre-is that the subject (in this case God) is constituted by a loss, by the removal of itself from itself, by the expulsion of the very Ground or essence from which it is made. The subject, in this sense, is always a nostalgic subject, forever trying to recover its loss. However, this Ground must remain outside of the subject for the subject to retain its consistency as a subject. The subject, in other words, must externalize itself in order to be a subject at all. What this means is that the subject is no longer opposed to the object, as it is in the other two models of subjectivity we have looked at; rather, subject and object are implicated in each other-the subject is the object outside of itself. The subject maintains what Žižek, following Lacan, calls a relation of extimacy towards itself. 'Extimacy' is a mixture of the two words 'external' and 'intimacy'. This external intimacy or extimacy designates the way in which the core of the subject's being is outside itself. If this sounds a little difficult to conceptualize, it is perhaps easiest to think of it in analogy to your eyeball. You can see everything except the part of you that does the seeing-your own eyeball. The only way you can see your eyeball is by looking in a mirror where it is outside of yourself. The subject is in an analogous position to this: it is a perspective on reality which cannot be grasped in itself but only in the 'mirror' of reality.
==vanishing mediator==
The concept of the 'vanishing mediator' is one that Žižek has consistently employed since For They Know Not What They Do. Žižek borrows the concept from an essay-'The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller'-by the North American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson (1934-). In the essay, Jameson analyses the critique of Marxism advanced by Max Weber (1864-1920), the influential German sociologist, Briefly, this critique consists in the claim that Protestantism was the condition of possibility for the emergence of capitalism, As Protestantism is a religion and capitalism is a mode of production, this explanation inverts the traditional Marxist hierarchy in which the base gives rise to the superstructure. Jameson's response to this is to show how capitalism developed out of Protestantism in a dialectical movement which is fully consistent with Marxism. He argues that this dialectic is driven by what he terms a vanishing mediator-the missing link between two terms. In this case, he proposes that Protestantism is the vanishing mediator between feudalism and capitalism. Before the advent of Protestantism, religion was a separate sphere from that of economics. Protestantism, however, universalized religion, bringing the world of work within its purview, prompting people to live ascetically by accumulating wealth and working hard. In so doing, it created the conditions of possibility for capitalism. Ironically, of course, the advent of capitalism led to the obsolescence of Protestantism in particular, and religion generally, as Jameson notes:
It [Protestantism] is thus in the strictest sense of the word a catalytic agent that permits an exchange between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms; and we may say that…the whole institution of religion itself…serves in its turn as a kind of overall bracket or framework within which change takes place and which can be dismantled and removed when its usefulness is over.(Jameson 1988b: 31)
A vanishing mediator, then, is a concept which mediates the transition between two opposed concepts and thereafter disappears.
Žižek draws attention to the fact that a vanishing mediator is produced by an asymmetry of content and form. As with Marx's analysis of revolution, form lags behind content, in the sense that content changes within the parameters of an existing form, until the logic of that content works its way out to the latter and throws off its husk, revealing a new form in its stead, Commenting on Jameson's essay, for example, Žižek proposes that:
The passage from feudalism to Protestantism is not of the same nature as the passage from Protestantism to bourgeois everyday life with its privatized religion, The first passage concerns 'content' (under the guise of preserving the religious form or even its strengthening, the crucial shift-the assertion of the ascetic-acquisitive stance in economic activity as the domain of the manifestation of Grace-takes place), whereas the second passage is a purely formal act, a change of form (as soon as Protestantism is realized as the ascetic-acquisitive stance, it can fall off as form).
(FTKN: 185)
Žižek sees in this process evidence of Hegel's 'negation of the negation', the third moment of the dialectic. The first negation is the mutation of the content within and in the name of the old form. The second negation is the obsolescence of the form itself. In this way, something becomes the opposite of itself, paradoxically, by seeming to strengthen itself. In the case of Protestantism, the universalization of religious attitudes ultimately led to it being sidelined as a matter of private contemplation. Which is to say that, Protestantism, as a negation of feudalism, was itself negated by capitalism.
It is only with the pronunciation of the Word (or a Symbolic experience of the Real), which introduces a cut into the Real and stands in for it, that God can establish His distance from it. In substantially the same way, although we, as bodies, are still part of the Real, we, as Symbolic subjects, are also differentiated from it. Which is to say that, although we are grounded in nature and can only survive within our bodies, simultaneously we are not merely our bodies; rather we have our bodies and can relate freely to them and it is language that enables us to do this.
==Schelling==
Once you have grasped the basic Lacanian concepts of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, you will notice that in his philosophical writings, such as in his discussion of Schelling, Žižek always interprets the work of other philosophers in terms of those concepts. This is because, as he admits on several occasions, 'the core of my entire work is the endeavour to use Lacan as a privileged intellectual tool to reactualize German Idealism' (TZR: ix). This raises three related questions: what is German Idealism, why does it need reactualizing, and what does 'reactualizing' mean? The term 'German Idealism' designates the work of philosophers such as Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Schelling and Hegel. The reason that Žižek believes German Idealism needs reactualizing is that he thinks we are taught to understand it in one way, whereas he regards the truth of it to be something else. The term 'reactualizing' (which is borrowed from Schelling) refers to the fact that there are different possible ways to interpret German Idealism, and that Žižek wishes to realize or make 'actual' one of those possibilities in distinction to the way it is currently realized or 'actualized'.
At its most basic, we tend to be taught that the German Idealists thought that the truth of something could be found in itself. For Žižek, on the other hand, the fundamental insight of German Idealism is that the truth of something is always outside itself. So, for example, the truth of our experience lies outside ourselves, in the Symbolic and the Real, rather than being buried deep within us. We cannot look into our selves and find out who we truly are, we cannot gaze into our own navels, because who we truly are is always elsewhere, Our navels, as it were, are somewhere else in the
Symbolic formations which always precede us and in the Real which we have to disavow if we are to enter the Symbolic in the first place.
The reason that Lacan occupies a privileged position for Žižek is that the key to his work can be found in the proposition that self-identity is impossible. The identity of something, its singularity or 'oneness', is always split. To put this in another way, there is always too much of something, an indivisible remainder, or a bit left over which means that it cannot be self-identical. For example, the meaning of a word can never be found in the word itself, but rather in other words. The meaning of 'cat' cannot be discovered in the word 'cat' but in the words 'small, domestic feline'. Therefore, the meaning of 'cat' is not self-identical. This principle of the impossibility of self-identity is what informs Žižek's reading of all the German Idealists, including Schelling. For instance, as we have seen, the Beginning is not actually the beginning at all-the truth of the Beginning lies elsewhere; it is split or not identical to itself.
The process of subjecting ourselves to language and to the rest of the Symbolic Order is what Žižek calls subjectivization. Although this sounds like the formation of the post-structuralist subject, the difference is that, for Žižek, subjectivization needs to be conceived as a two-way process. On the one hand, the Symbolic Order, or the big Other, precedes us and speaks through us. For example, we might be born into a family and bear that family's name, occupy a specific socio-economic position, follow a particular religion, and so on. On the other hand, because the Symbolic Order is incomplete or constituted by a lack (a lack which is the subject) the way in which we integrate these elements of the Symbolic and narrate them to ourselves is ours. For example, we might disown our family and change our name, invent a new religion, and so on. Even if we are some kind of cyborgs, the gap in the Symbolic means that we are not reducible to mere functions of the Symbolic or automatons, as Žižek notes when commenting upon the ambiguous status of the replicants in the film Blade Runner:
Despite the fact that their most intimate memories are not 'true' but only implanted, replicants subjectivize themselves by way of combining these memories into an individual myth, a narrative which allows them to construct their place in the symbolic universe.
(TWTN: 41)
It is the replicants' ability to create an individual story out of implanted memories that makes them seem human because that is exactly what we do too. We maintain our ability to integrate the elements of the Symbolic in an individual way and it is what Žižek terms the 'Self' that does this, what he defines as the 'centre of narrative gravity' (CATU: 261). In other words, the Self is what fills in the void of the subject, and while the subject never changes, the Self is open to constant revision.
==Summary==
==postmodern risk society==
==disintegration of the big Other==
==The act==
==False consciousness and cynicism==
==Belief machines==
==spectre that haunts reality==
==formulae of sexuation==
==Woman does not exist==
==There is no sexual relationship==
==fantasy==
==Che vuoi?==
