Table Of ContentParallax
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Parallax
The Dialectics of Mind and World
Edited by
Dominik Finkelde, Slavoj Žižek, and Christoph Menke
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Contents
Preface: Hegel and the Ethical Parallax Slavoj Žižek vii
Introduction Dominik Finkelde 1
Part 1 Parallax in Ontology
1 Parallactic Entanglement. On the Subject-Object-Relation in New
Materialism and Adorno’s Critical Ontology Dirk Quadflieg 15
2 Žižek’s Parallax, or The Inherent Stupidity of All Philosophical
Positions Graham Harman 27
3 How Mind Fits into Nature. Mental Realism after Nagel Markus Gabriel 39
4 Parallax in Hermeneutic Realism Anton Friedrich Koch 55
5 Object-Disoriented Ontology. Realism in Psychoanalysis Alenka Zupančič 69
6 Temporal Paradox, Realism, and Subjectivity Paul M. Livingston 81
7 The Parallactic Leap. Fichte, Apperception, and the Hard Problem of
Consciousness G. Anthony Bruno 93
8 The Parallax of Ontology. Reality and Its Transcendental
Supplement Slavoj Žižek 107
Part 2 Parallax in Normative Orders
9 Truth as Subjective Effect. Adorno or Hegel Christoph Menke 121
10 Is Sex a Transcendental Category of Parallax? Revisiting the Feminist
Second Wave Nina Power 133
11 The Irony of Self-Consciousness. Hegel, Derrida, and the Animal That
Therefore I Am Thomas Khurana 145
12 A Squinting Gaze on the Parallax between Spirit and Nature Frank Ruda 159
13 “ I Am Nothing, but I Make Everything”. Marx, Lacan, and the Labor
Theory of Suture Adrian Johnston 173
Part 3 Parallax in Aesthetics
14 Drama as Philosophy. The Tragedy of the End of Art Todd McGowan 187
15 Parallaxes of Sinister Enjoyment. The Lessons of Interpassivity
and the Contemporary Troubles with Pleasure Robert Pfaller 199
vi Contents
16 N autical Positioning. Navigating with Whitehead’s Process-
Ontology Eva Schürmann 209
17 F eeling at a Distance, or the Aesthetics of Unconscious
Transmission Tracy McNulty 227
18 Th e Dream That Knew Too Much. On Freud, Lacan, and
Philip K. Dick Dominik Finkelde 239
Notes on the Contributors 250
Index of Names 254
Index of Subjects 256
Preface
Hegel and the Ethical Parallax
Slavoj Žižek
Parallax is not just the unsurpassable ontological feature of an inconsistent universe, it
is also operative in the very heart of our ethical experience—let’s try to demonstrate this
through a recent representative reading of the ethical implications of Hegel’s thought.
In his last masterpiece The Spirit of Trust,1 Robert Brandom focuses on the notion
of “forgiving recollection” deployed by Hegel toward the end of the chapter on Spirit
in his Phenomenology: the gap that separates the acting subject and its severe judge is
overcome through their reconciliation when not only the agent confesses his sin but
the judge also confesses the unilaterality of his own position, his participation in what
he condemns: Evil is also the gaze which sees evil everywhere around it. Brandom’s
notion of forgiving recollection is very useful today: it enables us to see what is false in
precisely those who advocate tolerance and reject “hate speech.” Is today an exemplary
case of a rigid moral judgment not a politically correct subject who sternly condemns
those who are accused of practicing “hate speech”?
But there are clear limits to this notion of forgiving recollection. “Hegel
incorporates, adapts, and transforms the traditions he inherits—what we will come to
recognize as the way he recollectively forgives them” (514). To be brutal in a simplified
way: can we also “recollectively forgive” Hitler? And if the answer is no, is this because
Hitler cannot be in this sense forgiven or because we ourselves are not yet at the high
enough level of ethical reflection to do it? The only way to avoid regression to the
position of a “beautiful soul” (which passes judges from an external position exempted
from its object) is to endorse the second option—that our castigation of Hitler as
evil must be a reflexive determination of the Evil that persists in ourselves, that is, of
the non-reflected particularity that persists in our own position from which we pass
judgments. Let us note that many rightist revisionists today try to enact precisely
such a recollective forgiving of Hitler: yes, he made terrible mistakes, he committed
horrible crimes, but in doing this, he was just fighting for the ultimately good cause
(against the capitalist corruption for him embodied in Jews) in a wrong way. (It is
easy to construct a more rational and not rightist-revisionist version of how we who
condemn Nazism should also ask forgiveness: not only was anti-Semitism by far not
limited to Germany but was very strong in the nations that were at war with Germany;
not only did the obvious injustice of the treaty of Versailles as an act of revenge against
the defeated Germany also contribute to the Nazi rise to power; at a more general
level, fascism grew out of the dynamics and antagonisms of Western capitalism in
which also those who were its victims fully participated.) These revisionists also try to
balance responsibility in a pseudo-Hegelian way: were Hitler’s crimes not mirrored in
the one-sidedness of the Jewish position (their exclusive stance, their unwillingness to
viii Preface
integrate themselves into the German nation)? While we should totally reject this line
of reasoning, the solution is definitely not to draw a line between sins that could be
recollectively forgiven and those that are too strong and cannot be—such a procedure
introduces a duality that is totally at odds with Hegel’s approach. What one should
do is to change the very notion of recollective forgiving: to deprive this notion of any
echoes of “you are now forgiven, you are no longer really bad.” Brandom, of course,
raises this problem:
Some things people have done strike us, even upon due reflection, as simply
unforgivable. In these cases, though we might try to mitigate the consequences of
evil doings, we have no idea at all how to go about discerning the emergence of a
governing norm we could ourselves endorse. (716)
His answer is:
But now we must ask: Whose fault is it that the doing, or some aspect of it, is
unforgivable—the doer or the forgiver? Is the failure that of the bad agent or of the
bad recollector? Is whose fault it is a matter of how things anyway just are? Or is it
at least partly reflective of the recollector’s failure to come up with a more norm-
responsive narrative? (716)
But, again, should we in the case of the Holocaust also “acknowledge at least equal
responsibility on the part of the unsuccessful forgiver” (717)? And should we also claim
that “one must trust that this recollective-recognitive failure, too—like the failure of
the original, inadequately forgiven doer—will be more successfully forgiven by future
assessors (who know more and are better at it)” (718)? Furthermore, what about the
cases like cliterodectomy (or torture, or slavery in general), which we today experience
as horror but for which it is easy to reconstruct the normative background that makes
them acceptable not only for those who perform it but even for their victims? What
about such cases where the retroactive view makes them more unacceptable than they
were in their original context? Here also we are dealing with the unity of making and
finding: if we sternly judge and reject such cases, we do not only make new norms and
impose them onto the past acts, we, in some sense, also find that such acts were always
inacceptable even if they appeared acceptable to the agents.
The way to deal with this problem is perhaps indicated by the biblical story of
Habbakuk’s complaint, the most poignant expression of what one might call “the
silence of gods,” of the big question addressed at god from Job onward: “Where were
you when that horror/Holocaust, etc./happened? Why were you silent, why didn’t you
intervene?”—here are the words of this complaint:
How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you,
“Violence!” but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do
you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife,
and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.2
Preface ix
So how does god answer it? One should read this reply very carefully: “Look at the
nations and watch—and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your
days that you would not believe, even if you were told.” There is no simple teleological
justification here in the style of: “Be patient, strange are the ways of the lord, your
suffering serves a purpose in the wider divine plan that you cannot grasp from your
narrow finite standpoint…”—to say that the Holocaust (or anything similar to it)
serves some higher purpose unknown to us is an anti-Christian obscenity since the
whole point of Christ’s compassion is the unconditionally solidary with those who
suffer. To use yet again Agamben’s expression, one should gather here full courage of
hopelessness.
Back to the Holocaust, what does it mean that we should be “utterly amazed,”
and that something will happen that we “would not believe, even if we were told”?
While utter amazement can be read as referring to the incomprehensible horror of the
Holocaust, the unbelievable thing that happened later was the founding of the state of
Israel, which, one might surmise, would not have happened without the Holocaust,
and only in this sense could Hitler be retroactively “forgiven” by the existence of Israel,
which his crimes contributed to. But, again, one has to be very precise here: this in no
way justifies the Holocaust as the sacrifice Jews were ready to pay for the return to their
land (the thesis of some anti-Semites) or the claim that the Holocaust was part of a
secret divine plan to make possible the return of Jews to their homeland (also the thesis
of some anti-Semites)—it just means that the founding of Israel was an unexpected
and unplanned consequence of the Holocaust. And it also says nothing about other
injustices that resulted from this set of acts: the land to which Jews returned was for
long time inhabited by other people and cannot be simply designated as “theirs.”
The main trap to be avoided here is the one of holistic teleology: something that
appears to us as horror can be, from a larger perspective, an element that contributes
to global harmony, in the same way that a tiny stain in a large painting contributes to its
beauty if we look at the painting from a proper distance. The legacy of Job prohibits us
such a gesture of taking a refuge in the standard transcendent figure of God as a secret
Master who knows the meaning of what appears to us as a meaningless catastrophe,
the God who sees the entire picture in which what we perceive as a stain contributes
to global harmony. When confronted with an event like the Holocaust or the death of
millions in Congo in the last years, is it not obscene to claim that these stains have a
deeper meaning in that they contribute to the harmony of the Whole? Is there a Whole
that can teleologically justify and thus redeem/sublate an event like the Holocaust?
Christ’s death on the cross thus means that one should drop without restraint the notion
of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the
guarantee of historical teleology—Christ’s death on the cross is the death of this God, it
repeats Job’s stance, and it refuses any “deeper meaning” that obfuscates the brutal real
of historical catastrophes. Even a strong version of this logic—forgiving does not mean
not the sacrifice/erasure of the particular content but the recognition that particular
content is necessary for the actualization of the universal Good—is not strong enough:
recollective forgiving remains an ambiguous notion. In ethical sphere, it can be read
as “trying to understand what appears to us as evil,” reconstructing a hidden positive
motivation that just got expressed in a perverted way. However, retroactivity implies a
