Žižek is Wrong (Again)

With modern quantum physics, the great metaphysical split between philosophy and natural science is almost undeniably appearing to come full circle. In a reverse-event, the questions that separated physics from critical and transcendental philosophy seem to be the very questions that are today uniting them: can an object be defined in isolation? Is the position of the observer inscribed in the substantial world itself? Can the material world form a coherent, unified totality? These are the problems of physics today, and yet they have also been the problems of philosophy for around 200 years.

In 1991, Deleuze and Guattari saw an ally in physics when confronted with ‘the last question that the philosopher ever asks themselves’: What is Philosophy? Yet their use of physics was to extract models of chaos, of continuously varying virtual objects, and of an infinite multiplicity of abstracted intensities, which might point philosophy in a new direction. In other words, for Deleuze & Guattari, natural science did little more than provide certain possible horizons, new models of thought, which philosophy could appropriate and develop. This is radically different to what the development of quantum physics implies for the history (not the future) of philosophy. This latter problem, of reinterpreting the history of philosophy according to contemporary epistemes, is if anything where Slavoj Žižek sees his role: it is not about what physics means for philosophy, but of what philosophy means for physics. Unfortunately, however, Žižek’s method of reading modern science into philosophy - specifically, into Hegel and occasionally into Lacan - goes astray almost immediately.

Since the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit, it seemed Hegel at once needed rescuing. No sooner was the foundation of dialectical idealism laid, than Hegel began being misinterpreted as some mystical obscurantist or simple evolutionary philosopher of endless antitheses and syntheses. Several figures, including Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Alexandre Kojève, and the anti-Hegelian avatars of French Theory, seemed to have contributed to a perpetual misreading of the rigorous processes of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic. With Badiou, Žižek, Jameson (and the Ljubljana School more generally), however, Hegel was re-situated as an anti-teleological thinker of ontological paradoxes par excellence.

Of all three, Žižek’s reading of Hegel - the same reading which allows him to recognise Hegel’s greatest accomplices as Lacan and quantum mechanics - is the most straightforward: reality is ontologically incomplete. Yet it is exactly this conclusion which seems