The final moment of the dialectical process, the sublation of the difference, does not consist in the act of its sublation, but in the experience of how the difference was always-already sublated; of how, in a way, it never effectively existed. The dialectical sublation is thus always a kind of retroactive unmaking [Ungeschehen-Machen]; the point is not to overcome the obstacle to Unity but to experience how the obstacle never was one; how the appearance of an obstacle was due only to our wrong, finite perspective. We could trace this paradoxical logic back to Hegels particular analyses, to his treatment of crime and punishment in the philosophy of law, for example. The aim of punishment is not to re-establish the balance by recompensing for the crime but to assert how, in a radical ontological sense, the crime did not exist at all -- that is, does not possess full effectivity; by means of the punishment, crime is not externally abolished, it is rather posited as something that is already in itself ontologically null. Brought to its extreme, the logic of punishment in Hegel reads: ontologically, crime does not exist, it is nothing but a null and void semblance, and it is precisely for this reason that it must be punished. … The crucial feature of this dialectical retroactive unmaking is the interval separating the process of the change of contents from the formal closing act -- the structural necessity of the DELAY of the latter over the former. In a way, in the dialectical process, things happen before they effectively happen; all is already decided, the game is over before we are able to take cognizance of it, so that the final word of reconciliation is a purely formal act, a simple stating of what has already taken place. … The dialectical process is thus marked by a double scansion. First, we have the silent weaving of the Spirit, the unconscious transformation of the entire symbolic network, the entire field of meaning. Then, when the work is already done and when in itself all is already decided, it is time for a purely formal act by means of which the previous shape of the Spirit breaks up also for itself. The crucial point is that consciousness necessarily comes too late; it can take cognizance of the fact that the ground is cut from under its feet only when the infectious illness already dominates the field. The strategy of the New, of the spiritual illness, must therefore be to avoid direct confrontation for as long as possible; a patient silent weaving, like the underground tunnelling of a mole, waiting for the moment when a light push with the finger will be enough for the mighty edifice to fall to pieces. … In general, we could say that an ideological battle is won when the adversary himself begins to speak our language, without being aware of it. What we have here is the lapse of time already mentioned. The break never occurs now, in the simple present when things are brought to a decision. In itself , the battle is over before it breaks out: the very fact that it breaks out is an unequivocal sign that it is really already over; that the silent weaving has already done its job, that the die is already cast. The concluding act of victory thus always has a retroactive character; the final decision has the form of asserting that all is already decided. It is not without significance that today, the quoted passage from Hegel inevitably evokes psychoanalytic connotations; the silent weaving of the Spirit is Hegels term for the unconscious working-through, and we would be quite justified in reading the quoted passage as a refined psychological description of the process of conversion. Let us take the case of an atheist becoming a believer. He is torn by fierce inner struggles, religion obsesses him, he gibes aggressively at believers, looks for historical reasons for the emergence of the religious illusion, and so on -- all this is nothing but proof that the affair is already decided. He already believes, although he doesnt yet know it. The inner struggle ends not with the big decision to believe, but with a sense of relief that, without knowing it, he has always-already believed, so that all that remains is for him to renounce his vain resistance and become reconciled to his belief. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Verso, 2008 (second edition), pp.62-66.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 00:34:45 +0000
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