Žižek’s Kant, or The Crack in the Universal (Politicising the Transcendental Turn)

Although Slavoj Žižek presents his texts as reflecting a decisively Hegelian or (since 1997) Schellingerian philosophical heritage (Žižek, 1997; Žižek, 1998), this paper argues that two distinctively Kantian preoccupations are central in everything Žižek has written. The first is the ‘transcendental turn’, and Kant’s contention that subjects’ access to the world is never direct but always mediated (in Kant’s system, through the forms of sensibility and the schematised categories of the understanding). This move in Žižek’s work is ‘cashed out’ in his Lacanian rereading of the category of ideology. How and why this Marxian term should be used to describe the collective representations and practices Žižek contends structure individuals’ being-in-the-world yields one register of the ‘primacy of political reason’ in Žižek’s work. (see the Conclusion below). The second, ‘neoKantian’ motif that informs Žižek’s oeuvre, decisive for Žižek’s reading of Kant, is his concern with epistemic and moral finitude. Žižek’s political ontology originates in what I will term a ‘politicisation’ of the ontological field. Yet this politicisation, in its turn, is carried out under the heading of this second Kantian motif of finitude. To anticipate, the argument will be that Žižek’s entire philosophy, and his reading of Kant, turn around the following two positions: