Immanuel Kant

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   KANT (see also ANTIGONE/MEDEA, DERRIDA, HEGEL)
   The Kantian "transcendental' critique is absolutely crucial to Žižek,
   and he draws on it throughout his work. As Žižek writes. summariz-
   ing Kant's contribution to the history of philosophy: "On the one
   hand, the notion of the transcendental constitution of reality involves
   the loss of a direct naïve empiricist approach to reality; on the other
   hand, it involves the prohibition of metaphysics, that is, of an alb
   encompassing world-view providing the noumenal structure of the
    universe" (p. 167). And yet at the same time Žižek entirely agrees with
   Hegels argument that Kant himself misunderstood the nature of his
    breakthrough, that it is necessary to read Kant against or beyond
   himself. It is this that Hegel represents for Žižek: not an opposítion to
   Kant or even a simple surpassing of him, but a certain drawing out of
   consequences that are only implicit in him. As against the distinction
    between the noumenal and phenomenal in Kant, we can say that the
   'shift from Kant to Hegel   ... [is] from the tension between immanence
   and transcendence to the minimal difference gap in immanence itself
   . . . Hegel is thus not external to Kant: the problem with Kant was that
   he effected the shift but        was not able, for structural reasons, to
   formulate it explicitly" (p. 236). In this regard, Kant becomes increas-
   ingly identined for Žižek with        a certain 'masculine' logic of uni-
   versality and its exception (St), while Hegel represents a "feminine
   logic of the not-all in which there is nothing outside of phenomenal
   appearances but appearance is not all there is, precisely because
   of its ability to be marked as such (S). Zižek even goes on to compare
   Kant's noumenal phenomenal split to Derrida's ethics of 'Otherness
   and with Antigone's sacrifice of all things for one thing, as opposed
   to Hegel's truly modern ethics, in which even this cause itself must
    be sacrinced.

References

26-7, 62, 127, 131-2, 165, 166 Conversations