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Kritik der reinen Vernunft

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Zusammenfassung

The article starts from the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung and confronts it with the concept of the parallax as developed by Kojin Karatani and Slavoj Žižek. While Karatani develops the parallax in an apparently Kantian manner by insisting on the duality of the form, Žižek reads the parallax in a Hegelian way, inserting it into the dual and temporal structure of sublation. The parallax becomes the inner subversive core of the sublation, by which its inner gap is exposed. The insertion of the parallax, however, is put into effect via the reference to psychoanalysis: The Freudian/Lacanian hypothesis of sex as an interruption of nature becomes the externalized actualization of the Hegelian sublation. Sublation thus extends beyond its own boundaries.

In the traditional, almost spontaneous understanding of the infamous Aufhebung one recalls Hegel’s praise for the German language, its ability to reconcile two different motives within one single word. In the famous formulation of the Logic, Hegel explains the definition of Aufhebung

„What is sublated is not thereby reduced to nothing. Nothing is immediate; what is sublated, on the other hand, is the result of mediation; it is a non-being but as a result which had its origin in a being. It still has, therefore, in itself the determinateness from which it originates. To sublate‘ has a twofold meaning in the language: on the one hand it means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it also means to cause to cease, to put an end to.“

And some lines later he remarks that it is “a delight to speculative thought to find in the language words which have in themselves a speculative meaning; the German language has a number of such.“ Speculation can dwell within a single word, and within a word like Aufhebung, we find not only a duality of meaning, but, even more, also a specific form given to speculation: The contraposition, combination and juxtaposition of two opposing meanings. The duality that gives a structural form to the speculative Aufhebung relates more precisely a moment of continuation to a moment of discontinuation. However, continuation and discontinuation are not only opposed moments, but also moments within a temporal development.

The knot of sublation (Aufhebung) combines, juxtaposes in its most essential figure a temporal moment and a moment beyond temporality: Something has passed, but is also continued by being overcome. What is present is the result of the past, and as such, as a presence, it has a temporal form and a non-temporal form at the same time, it is mediated, but also an end. It is synchronic and diachronic, for it is a combination of past and present, but also an entity in itself: Aufhebung forms a knot of two asymmetric lines in which time is continued and abandoned at the same time. But in which way, then, is this intertwinement of the temporal and the a-temporal to be understood, as a temporal or as a structural form? Something that exists in time and out of time cannot but appear as ambivalent for the understanding: On the one hand, sublation cannot be reduced to a model of thought, to something Kant would call a pure form, on the other hand, sublation is more than an ephemeral, singular incident.

Time and its interruption form one aspect of the inner complication of the Aufhebung, but yet another aspect of the Aufhebung is the question of its completion. As a process, the Aufhebung in its entirety might or might not come to an end. Thus, the Aufhebung in its entirety is defined by an ambivalent temporality: A temporality that will have come to an end, will have turned into a structural form. The possibility of a completion has to come under doubt from two sides: The question is not only whether a form defined by temporality can come to an end, but the question is also whether it can stop at all because it might never have been complete from the beginning on: A remainder might always force the process of Aufhebung to begin anew.

To a certain degree such a formal attempt of the Aufhebung seems to remain lifeless, as it apparently develops only a very general point of the structure of Aufhebung: the intertwinement of past and present, and the ambivalence of the beginning and the end within a process which is defined temporally. But Hegel’s remark, when praising the mere word Aufhebung, is pointing to something else: Aufhebung, as a structural form and a word, becomes its own incident. Aufhebungis a case of Aufhebung. Aufhebung is a general form and a particular instance, and it this particularity that also undermines the generality of the form. Thus, one might ask whether Aufhebung, taken as a general form, does not necessarily have to produce a remainder, something that will not have been taken into account, as well as this very Aufhebung might become the object of another Aufhebung.

Here, however, Aufhebung as a word remains stuck between its general and its particular aspects, and we need to take a look at a different instance of its unfolding. A famous instance is Hegel’s figure of the monarch, and in reference to this figure Slavoj Žižek has shown, how the remainder and the continuation of sublation can be treated as moments within one and the same process of Aufhebung:

„Recall the process of the sublation of society in the rational totality of the state: for Hegel, this process realizes itself in the figure of the monarch, the conception of which is ‘of all conceptions the hardest for ratiocination, i.e., for the method of reflection employed by the Understanding’ – why? While Understanding can well grasp the universal mediation of a living totality, what it cannot grasp is that this totality, in order to actualize itself, has to acquire actual existence in the guise of an immediate ‘natural’ singularity.”

The totality of the process of sublation is sublated into an immediate figure of mediation: the monarch, then, actualizes the state precisely as an inner exception to it. The state, as a form of sublation becomes sublated in the form of an exceptional individual. The monarch actualizes the remainder, but the remainder is nothing else than the totality of the process, which could not have been sublated in the mere form of the state itself. The totality of the process is given as an exception, and it appears as such within the process of sublation – the sublation redoubles itself within itself as its own exception. A different view on the same situation might then describe the monarch as the point in which the entirety of the state differs from itself. The state needs to be understood from this point of view, it needs to be understood as this minimal difference in which it actualizes itself. Sublation, as a process, does not only combine two asymmetrical moments, but it is also, in its entirety, split and defined via the inner difference it takes in relation to itself. Temporality and its interruption on the one hand, and the inner split, the inner difference on the other hand are related, as the inner split elevates the problem of temporality to an inner form. The monarch is a living structure.

Let us interrupt the unfolding of difficulties here, and bring up a heretical question at this point instead. One might ask whether it is possible to think of this inner exception – its actualization and immediacy – as of an appearance not within the process of sublation, but outside of it. In the given example the monarch appears as the inner exception, but would it also be possible to think of this exception as appearing outside of the same process? Apparently this question is non-Hegelian, as it opens up an external opposition and suggests that within such an external opposition one moment might be considered as an internal exception to its opposite.

Let us take an example: Hegel. If we consider what is named ‘Hegel’ as the entirety of one process, a process of the actuality of thought, then the heretic question in its full simplicity would be whether it is possible to think of an inner exception within Hegel that actualizes itself only after Hegel and outside of Hegel. We are dealing here with the transition from some kind of a ‘one’ to some kind of a ‘two’: On the one hand, the Hegelian totality, in which all processes are a moments of ‘one’ process which cannot be grasped in its entirety, precisely because its entirety eludes this process, on the other hand the reappearance of this impossible moment outside of the very process. A monarch without a state, if we stick to our example.

To make a step further in this construction, we necessarily have to leave Hegel, and we have to take another conception into account, a conception that proposes a different view on the relation between the one and the other. At this point then we might consider a concept, which is apparently more Kantian in its form, namely the concept of the parallax.

However, we do not proceed to the concept of the parallax by pure chance, but rather because it was Žižek who took up this very concept and installed it in a constellation with the concept of sublation. Žižek takes the parallax from a detailed discussion of Kojin Karatani’s 2003 book Transcritique and includes it into his own conceptional framework especially in his 2006 book The parallax view. Thus it will be useful to begin with an examination of Karatani’s original coinage of the notion.

The concept of the parallax, as Kojin Karatani introduced it, entails an abyss. Transcritique relates Kant and Marx and unfolds the parallax as a specific form of relation, but it is a redoubled relation centered around a gap. The gap arises not simply between two different points of view, the real abyss opens up between the two sides of the concept itself. For Karatani employs the concept of the parallax in a doubled way: On the one hand, there is the duality between one subjective position and another subjective position, between Kant and Marx, the two acting figures of Karatani’s book. These two positions comply with two different lines of sight between which the actual subject – the ‘topic’ of Karatani’s book – is situated and changes its appearance. On the other hand, there is the space, the gap, between these two positions, which Karatani does not simply read as a kind of relational space or relational difference – not as an overlapping, nor as a result, but rather as a gap that becomes a form of its own, gains an independence from the relations it depends up on.

Thus we find two moments within the concept of the parallax: The first moment contains a duality, the second moment is the act of the form of that duality itself. Both moments are related, not only in terms of dependence and independence, but also as they fall in one – the concept functions just in the way as the relation which it describes, it determines two different poles and acts as the in-between. Karatani does not simply describe a parallax between Marx and Kant, the description itself is the very act of the parallax.

But these two differing mechanisms of the concept cannot be separated from each other, they transform continuously into their mutual opposites: every pole of the duality is an expression of the duality itself, as well as the poles define the in-between. Thus we never know whether we are on the side of the activity of the duality or on one of the sides of the described duality of views. Just like a Moebius strip, the concept of parallax is a disoriented concept or a concept of disorientation – striving for a different form of orientation.

Let us take briefly a more detailed look at the configuration of Karatani’s book Transcritique. The book brings together two apparently distant authors, Kant and Marx, and it begins by explaining the parallax in Kant. On the one hand, although Kant is often recalled as the philosopher who sought a way between empiricism and dogmatism, this position in-between cannot simply be understood as a “stable third position”: “Instead, it is the ‘parallax’ between positions that acts. Kant, too, performed a critical oscillation: He continuously confronted the dominant rationalism with empiricism, and the dominant empiricism with rationalism.“ On the other hand, Karatani unfolds Kant’s transcendental philosophy as the inscription of the other, the transcendental position involves a redoubling of one position with another position, it is internally redoubled: “Kant’s approach in Critique of Pure Reason is different not only from subjective introspection, but also from objective scrutiny. Though it is a self-scrutiny through and through, the transcendental reflection inscribes others’ viewpoint. Said inversely, though it is impersonal through and through, the transcendental reflection is still self-scrutiny.“ Thus we could say that Kant oscillated between two different views, but did also turn this oscillation into a methodological formula, namely into the transcendental reflection.

In the second part, Karatani then applies the antinomical structure of Kant’s transcendental account onto Marx. Marx is, on the one hand, read in a close relation to the broad field of revolutionary theories in his time, more specifically in relation to anarchist theories circling around the notion of the association. Contrary to what one might assume, Karatani then focuses on the other hand on the theory of the value form to establish Marx as a parallactic thinker. Thus, Karatani does not cling to the apparently more political work of the early Marx, but relies on the mature economic theory of Capital. Surplus value, as the essential moment of Capital, is explained as a ‘transcritical’ structure insofar as it results from the exchange between different value systems:

“As Marx said, deriving surplus value from the division of circulation alone within a value system is an unequal exchange, a fraud. On the other hand, in the case of exchange between different value systems, surplus value can be achieved even if each deal is of equal exchange within each system. Thus the Marxian antinomy is solved by invoking multiple value systems—and no other way.”

Surplus value can only be generated, if different value systems are confronted. When workers sell their labour and buy the commodities afterwards, a differenciation is introduced that allows for the generation of surplus value. The confrontation of value systems is formalized in the value form. In it, a synthesis is provided not by sublation, but rather in the form of a “salto mortale”: The commodity can be turned into money only through the moment of a critical leap, the success of which cannot be guaranteed in advance. The value form thus becomes an antinomical form, which is taken to be a form of a synthesis: mediated by the ‘salto mortale’. The Marxian method thus appears as an actualization of the Kantian antinomy, taken from the realm of pure reason to its practical actuality.

Thus, in regard to Marx, we do not only find an oscillation between differing political views, but, again, we find this oscillation turned into a methodological form. And if we get back to the question how Karatani relates Kant and Marx, we can, in a first approach, understand the project of a ‘transcritique’ as an active, redoubled position in-between these two poles: The actual, independent ‘topic’ of Karatani’s book is to be found in-between the poles of Kant and Marx, although this position ‘in-between’ is only given within these poles themselves. Karatani unfolds Kant as an internally parallactic position in relation to Marx, and Marx as an internally parallactic position in relation to Kant, but there is not only Kant and Marx, there is also the process in-between them. It is difficult to tell what the actual Gestalt of this process is, tentatively one might understand Karatani as thinking the confrontation of morals and economy, transposing it into a new and different form of socialism.

One obvious difficulty that arises from this structure of thought is the consequence for philosophy. We will have to ask, whether a certain actuality of thought is realized ‘in-between’: Not only in-between thinkers, like Kant and Marx, but also in-between different positions of thought – between empiricism and dogmatism in Kant, between the social and economic in Marx. The parallax, in Karatani’s understanding, unfolds this in-between not as a point at which positions merge, but rather as the confrontation of their differences. This problem extends to the actuality of philosophy itself: The parallactic object of philosophy is rather the “reality that is exposed through difference“.

Regarding the parallactic ‘object’ of philosophy in our concrete example, the question then would be whether there is thought that finds its expression in Kant and in Marx, but is irreducible to either one of them. To spell out this problem even more directly, this would imply that such a thought would have no direct source nor a distinct terrain, it is neither uttered as such by one of the authors, nor can it be restricted to one of them. To reiterate this in more classical terms, we can say that the parallax as a concept in philosophy blends the problem of the subject of thought on the one hand with the object of thought on the other hand – twice: They fall in one as the parallax performs what it determines, and they fall apart as the thought of the parallax is distinct from its thinkers. The line of difference then, by which the parallax as a concept is defined, cannot be the line between subject and object, but the line rather is a form: a combination of separation and combination. It is the question of a coincidence of thinker and thought as well as it is a question of the separation of thinker and thought.

At this point, one might of course raise the doubt that this problematization of the parallax leads directly outside the realm of critical and rational thought. For thought to be rational, the lines of the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ need to be distinguished, or, in other words, it needs to be clear that a thought thinks something and is thought by someone. Thus, the problem of the parallax sketched out in these rather broad terms, might appear as some kind of a hyperbole, and one might argue that it systematically exaggerates a difficulty, which can be found at the grounds of any interpretation, any reception, any continuation of thought as such: The presupposition of a stable identification of an object or a subject of thought before any account of their destabilization might be set to work. But there is a difference: The parallax does not confront us simply and only with the destabilization of the attribution of a thought to a thinker, in its very core it confronts us with the question whether the identified subject or object might be secondary or at least a simultaneous occurrence to the actuality of a thought itself.

As already mentioned, Karatani’s concept was taken up again by Slavoj Žižek who published in 2006 his book The Parallax View in which he referred extensively to Karatani’s project, albeit giving a slightly different twist to the concept.

“It is the wager of this book that, far from posing an irreducible obstacle to dialectics, the notion of the parallax gap provides the key which enables us to discern its subversive core. To theorize this parallax gap properly is the necessary first step in the rehabilitation of the philosophy of dialectical materialism.“

But this unfolding of the parallax contains a much more comprehensive shift than only adopting the concept of the parallax as a dialectic concept. We can determine two different yet interdependent steps in Žižek’s continuation of the parallax as a philosophical concept. First, the inscription of the parallax into the Hegelian universe entails a perspective on Hegel’s relation to Kant that cannot be reduced to the usual one-sided story of the overcoming of the subjective transcendental by the objective dialectic. It is, although and because Žižek understands himself as a committed Hegelian philosopher, far more complex. Second, besides the relation between Kant and Hegel that finds its inscription into Hegel, this latter Hegel is one, who is read, by Žižek, via Lacan. Regarding the parallax as a concept of philosophy, we should take this reference to Lacan at first as in a purely structural sense: Thus, there is a Lacanian inscription into a Hegel who is read as a specific consequence out of Kant. From this structural constellation we can already infer that the Hegel we receive is a Hegel who is extended on two sides. The Hegel we get in Žižek is not pure, although it might turn out that this impurity can be addressed as the essence of Hegel itself. And even though this might come along as a trick in the first moment – as if the impurity could simply be turned into the purity of Hegel, as if the paradox were the essence –, the point is not the simple inversion, but rather the externalisation of time. The question is whether something essential in Hegel appears outside of Hegel.

In his 2019 book Sex and the Failed Absolute, Žižek reiterated once more his position on the relation between Kant and Hegel, a relation, which can be considered as one of the essential fields of thought throughout Žižek’s entire work. The structure of this claim is not easy to grasp, or, put differently, it can easily be misunderstood. To begin with, Žižek takes the structure of the antinomies of reason to be the decisive feature of Kantian philosophy. Then, Žižek reads Hegel not as a philosopher who was able to overcome these antinomies, but rather as the philosopher who resituated the structural antinomy on the side of the object. Before we further develop the complications of this reading of Hegel, let us take an example in which Žižek makes this structure very clear. In Sex and the Failed Absolute he writes:

„The question that arises here is: how can we think this ‘euthanasia of reason’ (reason’s inevitable entanglement in radical antinomies, its inability to grasp reality in its totality, as a Whole) without positing (or presupposing; in short—in Hegelese—positing as presupposed) an In-itself out of reach of our reason? There is, of course, only one (Hegelian) way: to enact the move from epistemological deadlock to ontological impossibility, i.e., to conceive a radical antagonism (a parallax split) as immanent to reality itself.“

To resituate the antagonism on the side of the object does imply that Hegel’s point of view ‘radicalizes’ Kant’s subjective antinomies by transferring them into the objectivity itself. The decisive question is, however, whether this transfer does also imply that the subjective antinomies as such have become objective antinomies? If this were the case, then the Hegelian objectivation of the antinomies leads to an objectivation of the subject. The point is not to assume a dissemination of the subject in the object, the question is rather whether we have to understand the subject as an inherently objective feature. But Žižek is fully aware of this risk. Let us take Žižek’s remark into account first: „What this means is that the shift from Kant to Hegel, from epistemological antinomies to antinomies inscribed into the Thing itself, does not involve any kind of a return to pre-critical metaphysics where we simply provide an image of objective reality as traversed with antinomies. Antinomies are not redoubled in the sense that subjective antinomies, instead of being an obstacle to access of the Thing, ‘reflect’ antinomies of the Thing. Our contact with the Absolute is the very subjective ‘distortion,’ so the move beyond Kant does not involve any kind of ‘objective’ dialectics but the inclusion of subjective ‘distortions’ into ‘objective’ processes—this redoubling of ‘distortion’ is what defines the Absolute.“

Even if it is very clear that the Hegelian philosophy is not to be understood as some objective dialectics in which the subject and the object would have to be considered as parts of a generalized objectivity, it is much more difficult to define the positive understanding of the ‘distortion’. “The inclusion of subjective ‘distortions’”, as Žižek writes, “into objective processes” – there is only one way to read this formulation without falling back into the realm of an “’objective’ dialectic”, namely to understand these subjective distortions primarily as distortions of the objective: As moments of resistance to and difference within the realm of the objective itself. They cannot be necessary, and they cannot be general if this difference from and resistance to is a successful difference and resistance. Moments of the subject are rare and contingent.

If we understand the subjective distortion in this way, the entire picture changes. From this point of view, one would even have to think of Kant as of the ‘objective’ dialectician, for it is in Kant’s philosophy that the account of the subjective is fixed and determined. But is it, then, really an “inclusion” of the antinomic structure within the objective or couldn’t one rather argue that in Kant’s and Hegel’s account two completely different takes on subjectivity are at stake? Thus, we find our basic motives of the parallax again, namely the combination of the duality and the act of the in-between. In our case, the duality is the duality of Kant and Hegel but also the duality of the split within the object, and the active in-between is the gap itself: the gap within the object, but also the gap between Kant and Hegel, the gap which might turn out to be the subject – split by the split object.

What becomes more pressing and perceptible here is the temporal relation, for Žižek clearly marks a relation of the ‘overcoming’ of Kant by Hegel, when he emphasizes the inscription of antinomies into the ‘Thing’ itself. In which way ever this ‘overcoming’ might have to be interpreted, it is very clear that the relation is not defined by mutuality and simultaneity. In this regard, we can determine a difference in Žižek’s application of the parallax, distinguishing it from Karatani’s use: For Karatani, the entire weight is put on the structural aspects of the parallax, and time is taken as a structural moment of the antinomy. The antinomy creates a specific duality, a scene of repetition between Marx and Kant, but Karatani does not develop this into a temporal process of the form, be it of overcoming, of continuation or in some antithetical manner. The temporal aspect flashes sometimes here and there, for example when Karatani introduces Kant as a proto-communist, but actually these are flashes that attempt to restore a certain, Kantian, equivalence. In Karatani’s project the parallax unfolds its duality beyond temporality. It is as if Kant and Marx were mysteriously representing the same time. This form of the antinomy reminds, of course, of Kant, it recalls the mysterious a-temporality of the transcendental understanding, which acts within the phenomenal realm without a time of itself. If Karatani is a Kantian, Žižek is a Hegelian then, and the Hegelian twist of the parallax is to be found in the diachronic aspect that is added to the form of the parallax. The duality unfolds in time. But here, the question needs to be: Is this possible at all? Are we still talking of a duality once time is inserted and both poles of the duality are reorganized in a temporal becoming? The Hegelian – and non-dualistic – answer is, yes, it can be, as – dialectically – the duality reappears on both sides. What we find in the dialectical model then is the combination of the non-temporal, formal structure with the inscription of temporality – Aufhebung.

But besides the temporal aspect there is a further, formal moment of asymmetry involved in Žižek’s form of the parallax

„The parallax is not symmetrical, composed of two incompatible perspectives on the same X: there is an irreducible asymmetry between the two perspectives, a minimal reflexive twist. We do not have two perspectives, we have a perspective and what eludes it, and the other perspective fills in this void of what we could not see from the first perspective.“

If we take this definition of the parallax back to the duo Kant and Hegel, we can conclude that Hegel’s perspective is the one focusing on what is eluded in the Kantian perspective – the subjective distortion within the objective. But there is more. This asymmetry does result in a completely different picture of the parallax. Instead of a kind of a shifting parallel, we rather find the inscription of a differential perspective – Hegel – within the first perspective – Kant. But isn’t this version of the parallax then closely related to the conception of Aufhebung, is it not perhaps a latent redoubling of the Aufhebung? If we think of Žižek’s example of the Monarch – and of the sublation of sublation via the immanent exception –, we might think of a parallel and difference between the conception of sublation and parallax. On the one hand, the sublation of the sublation does not present an eluded perspective, but the monarch embodies an exception as the peak point of the structure itself. But on the other hand, the exception of the monarch is, precisely in its exceptionality, the moment of a different perspective on the same situation (the state). We might then rather say that the concept of the parallax emphasizes a specific aspect within the structure of the Aufhebung: Namely the aspect of the gap that separates the exception from the structure within which it is an exception. This then can be taken as “subversive core” of dialectics, which might be discerned by the means of the parallax, as Žižek had put it.

But we have to go a step further: In the relation of Kant and Hegel, which Žižek formulates as a redoubling of the Kantian antinomies, we find a different structure than the typical sublation or overcoming of Kant by Hegel one would assume. The entire structural complication unfolds, as Žižek resumes, in four steps. Kant makes the first step, with the invention of the realm of the transcendental. The antinomies of reason, the unavoidable obstacles reason stumbles upon and gets entangled in, are not only to be read as a sign of a “failed ontology”, but “this hindrance is inscribed into its very form: the transcendental form is in itself inconsistent, caught in its own antagonisms.“ The second step, as we already saw briefly, consists in the Hegelian inscription of this deficiency into the notion of reality as such: The „antinomy doesn’t concern only our reason and its transcendental space, it is a feature of (transcendent) reality itself, i.e., we gain access to the In-itself not by overcoming antinomies as a sign of the deficiency of our reason but by identifying our deficiency with the deficiency inscribed into reality itself. This shared deficiency is the zero-level at which reality and the transcendental dimension overlap.“

But now we have to take two further steps into account. As a third moment, psychoanalysis – in its doubled, Freudo-Lacanian version – enters the field.

“Freud’s implicit hypothesis (explicated by Lacan) is that, in human beings, the name of this ‘deficiency’ is sexuality. Sexuality is not the natural base of civilized life but the very elementary gesture of ‘civilizing’ the life of a human animal. This is our central Freudian premise: neither work nor language but sex is our (human) point of breaking with nature, the space where we confront ontological incompleteness and get caught in the endless self-reproducing loop in which the aim of desire is not its goal but the reproduction of its lack.“

Before we get to the questions that arise here, let us quickly add the fourth step, which consists in the universal turn of the notion of sexuality: “The fourth (and last) step is that of expanding this function of sexuality to [the, JV] entire reality—not, of course, by way of some kind of sexualized ontology, but by way of asking how reality has to be structured to allow for such enchainment of deficiencies.“

What we thus find, is a (Hegelian) quadruplicity of steps, beginning with a singular, negatively structured event (Kant), which is brought to its essence as a ‘shared deficiency’ and as a ‘zero-level’ of reality, and is then again short-circuited with another singular, negatively structured event, namely the Freudian hypothesis of sex as the interruption of nature. Finally then, this second singular moment is brought to its universalized essence: reality is sexed. Structurally, what we find is a repetition. A negative singular moment is taken to its essence, once in relation to reason, once in relation to nature. But both moments of this repetition are not simply repeated (as if it were an ‘external repetition’), but are intertwined, related in the form of sublation. The second couple of ‘negative singularity – universality‘ is plugged onto the first, and what we receive is not simply a further specification of the Hegelian ‘reality’, but its specification as being interrupted, structured by a gap within the antinomical gap: reality is sexed, that is to say that it is inherently parallactic, asymmetrical and doubled. In other words, it is irreconcilable. What we find is a parallax of two universalized exceptions, twisted onto each other in the form of a sublation, and as a result the presentation of a parallactic, sexed, reality.

The core of this construction can be found in the conjunction Hegel-Freud/Lacan: But this core then again is not the ‘essence’ of the constellation, it is the core more precisely in that sense that we find the internal chain-link of the two processes, namely the chain link between the universalized negativity on the one side and the inscription of the negative singularity of the second chain. But how to understand, first of all, the Hegelian ‘zero-level’? In a reaction to a critique by Robert Pippin, Žižek describes his reading of the Hegelian structure in the following way:

“The parallax-split is here radical: on the one hand, everything that we experience as reality is transcendentally constituted; on the other hand, transcendental subjectivity had to emerge somehow from the ontic process of reality. Terms like ‘absolute recoil’ or ‘gap’ are to be located at this para-transcendental level, to describe the pre-ontic AND pre- ontological structure of (what becomes through it transcendental constitution) objective reality.“

In general, Žižek distinguishes – following Kant – between the transcendental realm, which describes how things appear to us, and the ‘ontic’ or ‘ontological’, by which the things are described as they are. The distinction is mainly a distinction of the direction of questioning the reality: It is different to ask how natural phenomena work from within themselves than to reflect on the appearance of the phenomena to us. Both spheres do not simply overlap, they overlap at the point of their exception: the transcendental is the exception from the ontic, while the ontic reaches beyond the transcendentally accessible. The ‘zero-level’ of reality is to be found in this point of the intersection of exceptions. Here then, it becomes clear how the second negative exception is grafted onto this ‘zero-level’: Sex is the phenomenal appearance of the incompleteness of this ontic reality of the ‘zero-level’.

But the thought of sexed reality appears in-between Hegel and Freud, it cannot be reduced to one of the poles in-between which it appears. At the same time, both poles are related in the form of a sublation, as the second process actualizes the essential incompleteness of the first. Thus, the Freudian/Lacanian turn does not only present a different line of sight, it does also actualize the totality of the reality in its incompleteness. What we find, is the form of sublation stretched into time, rigth at the point of its inner parallax: For the Freudian/Lacanian turn is, one might say, the actualization of Hegel’s monarch outside of Hegel. Psychoanalysis is the exiled monarch.

The thought of sexed reality is both, a parallactic sublation and a sublated parallax, but what changes is that the parallactic point of the sublation is actualized outside of this process. The Hegelian sublation is brought to its essence outside of itself, stretched in time to find its completion in the Freudian/Lacanian actualization of the incompletion of the reality. The ‘subversive core’ appears externalized. As such, by the means of the parallax, the sublation cannot be conceived as an identical form anymore, it radicalizes the impurity of its form by externalizing its parallactic split.

What remains? Two moments remain open, a moment of time and a moment of form: What remains open, is the relation between Žižek and Karatani, the question how this relation is to be thought. What further remains open is, structurally, the question whether the parallax, even in its externalization, might prove to be nothing more than the inner exception of the sublation.

But besides the temporal aspect there is a further, formal moment of asymmetry involved in Žižek’s form of the parallax.

“The parallax is not symmetrical, composed of two incompatible perspectives on the same X: there is an irreducible asymmetry between the two perspectives, a minimal reflexive twist. We do not have two perspectives, we have a perspective and what eludes it, and the other perspective fills in this void of what we could not see from the first perspective.“

But now we have to take two further steps into account. As a third moment, psychoanalysis – in its doubled, Freudo-Lacanian version – enters the field.