We begin with Nietzsche and his unerring instinct to discern the ressentiment of the thwarted will. Behind the sage that teaches denial of the Will to Life are impotent comical figures, envious of life-asserting creativity, and elevated to the pose of resigned wisdom. There are no easy exits from metaphysics. One has to bear the burden of passing through the pain of metaphysical nihilism. “One should reject as futile all false sedatives, all direct attempts to suspend the mad vicious cycle of modern technology by means of a return to pre-modern traditional wisdom, all attempts to reduce the threat of modern technology to the effect of some ontic social wrong” (Zizek, 11). For Heidegger, the true problem is not ecological crisis, but the technological mode of relating to entities around us. Heidegger devalues the effort to constrain the system, to put a human face on it and compel it to behave respectfully. Such half-hearted efforts are attempts to flee the inner truth of the system that becomes perceptible within the horizon of excess: the what of what one imagines the worst to be: the notion of the system’s truth emerges in its excess.
Heideggerians are thus always in search of a positive, ontic political system that would come closest to the epochal ontological truth, a strategy that “inevitably” leads to failure, something only acknowledged after the fact and after the disastrous outcome of one’s engagement. “Those one came closest to the ontological Truth and condemned to err at the ontic level.” The error is always about the line of separation between ontic and ontological. One should endeavor to avoid confusing the ontological horizon with ontic choices. The complicity of things on deeper structural levels, how ecological and progressive and conservative oppositions to the modern universe of technology are already embedded in the horizon of what they purport to reject: green technology to amend the technological exploitation of nature, progressive hedge funds to amend the structural inequalities of the financial industry. Such maneuvers repeat the elementary ideological gesture of maintaining “an inner distance towards the ideological text—of claiming that there is something more beneath it, a non-ideological kernel.”
The problem lies with the expectation that a political movement will directly refer to its historic0-ontological foundation. This expectation is profoundly metaphysical, “insofar as it fails to recognize the gap separating the direct ideological legitimization of a movement from its’ inner greatness (its historico-ontological essence) is constitutive, a positive condition of its functioning” (15).
The Kantian notion of the Sublime is strictly correlative to this failure of ontology/cosmology. It designates the inability of transcendental imagination to bring about the closure of the horizon necessary for the notion of a cosmos. Heidegger emphasizes how Kant’s critique of pure reason provides the foundation of a new ontology of finitude and temporality. What Heidegger misses, according to Zizek, is that the antinomies of pure reason generated by Kant’s insistence on the subject’s finitude undermine the very notion of cosmos as a whole of the universe, as a meaningful hermeneutic totality of surroundings, as a life-world in which a historical people dwells. Heidegger misses the suspension of the (being in the) world, the dimension of psychotic withdrawal, as the ultimate (im)possiblility, as the most radical dimension of subjectivity, as that against which the violent synthetic imposition of a (new) Order—the Event of Historical Disclosure of Being—is the defense.
Thus, the guises of the monstrous Sublime as conceptualized by Kant is ‘wholly incompatible’ with Heidegger’s conception of the monstrous. The violent imposition of a new historical shape of Being of which Heidegger speaks is the obverse of the Kantian suspension of World-Disclosure. This gesture pushes the ethical Law into the Empty Sublime, and its primordially repressed content is the abyssal ‘night of the world:’ the monstrousness of a spontaneity not yet bound by any Law—death drive.
In his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger endeavors to think the moral law itself—that is, the problematic of practical Reason—according to the same model of the synthesis of imagination as pure auto-affection, as the unity of activity (spontaneity) and passivity (receptivity): in his moral experience, the subject submits to the Law that is not external but posited by himself, so that being affected by the call of moral Law is the ultimate form of self-affection—in it, as well as in the Law that characterizes autonomous subjectivity, autonomy and receptivity coincide (TTS, 46).
What we are dealing with here is—in Hegelese—the minimal gap between in-itself and for-itself; Derrida described this gap apropos the notion of the gift. As long as the gift is not recognized, it is not fully a gift; however, the moment that it is recognized as a gift, it is no longer a pure gift, since it is already caught in the cycle of exchange. The paradox points towards the key feature of dialectical materialism which is clearly perceptible in chaos theory and quantum physics (and, perhaps, defines what we call post-modernism): a cursory approach ignorant of details (or even generates) the features which remain out of reach to a detailed, exceedingly close approach. The paradox thus lies in the fact that ‘false’ appearance is comprised within the thing itself. And, therein, lies the dialectical unity of essence and appearance: the approximate ‘view from afar’ which ignores all the details and limits itself to the mere appearance is nearer the essence than a close gaze; the essence of a thing thus paradoxically constitutes itself through the very removal of the false appearance from the Real in its immediacy. There is reality, and within it is there is the interface screen of appearances; finally, on this screen, essence appears. The catch is thus that appearance is literally the appearing/emerging of the essence—that is, the only place for essence to dwell. Within the domain of reality itself, a line must be drawn which separates ‘raw’ reality from the screen through which the hidden Essence of reality appears, so that if we take away this medium of appearance, we lose the very essence which appears in it.
Read as such, Kant recoils from the abyss of the transcendental imagination. However, one wonders what this loss of essence entails in a world of objects and networks. Is, in other words, essence anthropomorphic? In a cosmos of objects qua interacting agents, is it possible for essence to lose its human stink? Kant imagines that if we were to gain access to the noumenal domain, we (humans = moral law) would be equated with Things-in-Themselves, and man would be turned into a lifeless puppet because of his direct insight into the monstrosity of the divine Being-in-itself. Is the noumenal domain thus not object-oriented? Zizek considers Kant’s positing of the noumenal as a kind of fundamental fantasy, “the Other scene of freedom, of the spontaneous free agent, the scene in which the free agent is turned into a lifeless puppet at the mercy of a perverse God.”
Its lesson, of course, is that there is no active free agent without this phantasmatic support, without this Other scene in which he is totally manipulated by the Other. In short, the Kantian prohibition of direct access to the noumenal domain should be re-formulated : what should remain inaccessible to us is not the noumenal Real, but our fundamental fantasy itself—the moment the subject comes too close to this phantasmatic core, he loses the consistency of his existence.
For Kant, direct access to the noumenal would deprive us of the spontaneity that forms the core of transcendental freedom. We would be reduced to ‘thinking machines.’ Is, however, this conclusion inevitable, for is the status of consciousness basically that of freedom in a system of radical determinism? Are we only free as long as we fail to recognize the causes determining us? The mistake of identifying self-consciousness with misrecognition, with an epistemological obstacle, is that it stealthily reintroduces the standard pre-modern, cosmological notion of reality as a positive order of being.
In such a fully constituted positive chain of being, there is no place for the subject, so the dimension of subjectivity can be conceived of only as something strictly co-dependent with the epistemological misrecognition of the true positivity of being. Consequently, the only way to account effectively for the status of self-consciousness is to assert the ontological incompleteness of reality itself: there is reality only insofar as there is an ontological gap, a crack, at its very heart—that is, a traumatic excess, a foreign body that cannot be integrated into it.
Hegel’s ‘night of the world’ dramatizes the momentary suspension of the positive order of reality. This pre-ontological dimension is best discerned through the crucial Hegelian gesture of transposing epistemological limitation into ontological fault. For Kant, epistemological limitation is translated as the transcendental constitution of reality, which is expressed as ‘ the conditions of possibility of our knowledge are at the same time the conditions of possibility of the object of our knowledge.’ Hegel, on the other hand, turns this around into its negative: the limitation of our knowledge, the failure to grasp the Whole of Being, the way knowledge is inexorably entangled in inconsistencies and contradictions, is simultaneously the limitation of the very object of our knowledge. The gaps and voids in our knowledge are simultaneously the gaps and voids in the ‘real’ ontological edifice itself. What we have here is not the deployment of an ambitious global ontological totality of Being—a trap Hegel is often accused of espousing, and a trap furthermore often unknowingly translated as the grand future metaphorics of network and agent interconnectivity/multitude—but rather the way in which the ‘innermost motor’ of the dialectical process deals with the interplay between epistemological obstacle and ontological deadlock.
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