Tengo este otro blog bibliográfico, no sé si se lo había contado a mis lectores, y cada día publico una bibliografía. Hoy toca una...
Bibliografía sobre COMUNICACIÓN:
Vanity Fea - Blog de notas de José Angel García Landa (Biescas y Zaragoza)
domingo, 29 de junio de 2025
Bibliografía sobre COMUNICACIÓN
Slavoj Žižek, "The Return to Hegel"
This is a critical commentary of a rambling series of lectures by Slavoj Žižek, "The Return to Hegel"—on Hegel and historicity (& Marxism & Malebranche & Masturbation, etc.), with an emphasis on the retroactive dimension of the historical process, which is also the main subject of our critical examination.
Full text:
Slavoj Žižek, The Return to Hegel
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5107607
7 Pages Posted: 24 Mar 2025
Date Written: October 31, 2012
Keywords: Slavoj Žižek, Hegel, Political philosophy, Philosophy of history, Marxism, Retrospection, Historicity
Suggested Citation:
Garcia Landa, Jose Angel, Slavoj Žižek, The Return to Hegel (October 31, 2012). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5107607 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5107607
Vanity Fea, miércoles, 31 de octubre de 2012
A rambling lecture by Slavoj Zizek on Hegel and historicity (& Marxism &
Malebranche & Masturbation, etc.), with an emphasis on the
retroactive dimension of the historical process, which is what I'm
interested in:
"You can only discover a necessity retroactively". "Necessities only take place retroactively". "Once things happen, then they become necessary" (3rd video).
The Return to Hegel (video 1 of 16)
Slavoj Zizek - The Return to Hegel. Video lecture, 2009. 1/16. Online at YouTube (egsvideo) 1 March 2012.*
2012
The Return to Hegel
Something unique happened in Hegel:
post-Hegelian philosophy is an attempt to obliterate what Hegel did, in
part by constructing a ridiculous image of Hegel—a kind of screen
memory which conceals a (Lacanian) traumatic excess.
The beginnings of the anti-Idealist critique of Hegel in Schelling: the
Idea is a secondary process, the natural process including the
unconscious & the world's body so to speak is the primary process.
(Of course one can argue that Hegel's perspectival focus on the idea is
an axiomatic perspectival choice, a focus of attention).
Kant: "Man is an animal who needs a master" to tame a certain excess of
non-natural instinct (what Freud calls the "death drive" or
immortality, something that insists beyond life and death). It's not
that culture breaks with nature, there is in between these instincts
which are no longer purely animal, the death drive, the sex drive...
We humans do many things which do not have a utilitarian value (Zizek
seems to be looking for S.J. Gould's terms exaptation, spandrels,
etc.—mixing it up a bit
with the concept of sexual selection). Pinker and the "chocolate fudge"
idea of the mind, exaptation gone wild. Our mind did not emerge to
understand itself, Pinker says, but to deal with practical purposes.
But we do bother about impossible tasks from the very beginning,
metaphysics, philosophy. All great inventions emerge from an
unusual logic of discovery: you invent something out of metaphysical
speculation, and later practical uses appear. It doesn't work the
Marxist way.
(And I suppose that's the beginning of a return to Hegel).
Humans internalize desire in an irrational way—not like
the apes' rational choice or partners— humans stick it out to the end,
in an irrational way. The other world, immortality, the Undead...
Freud's problem was to deal with that, that excess of desire.
What Zizek tries to do is to combine German idealism and
Freudianism—not in order to demean German idealism, but to raise Freud
to the category of a philosophical thinker.
For Hegel, Kant's recognition of an excess of negativity is not just a
starting point which then leads to perfect reconciliation. NO.
Hegel does not believe in the possibility of perfect reconciliation.
Radical negativity, excess, is everywhere, it explodes again and again.
It is neither nature nor culture— but it is the engine of the Hegelian
progress. Once you are in culture, you retroactively
de-naturalize nature. Culture becomes a suicidal, repetitive drive,
which needs to be reacted against. E.g. in sexuality—derived into
foreplay, denaturalization, masturbation, etc.; what is peripheral
tends to become central.
The example of Leader's psychoanalytical patient's slip of the tongue,
taking a woman to dinner, said to the waiter "bed for two"—Leader's
interpretation is that the slip of tongue is due to a defense against
enjoying too much the foreplay, a protest against the logic of the
deviation of desire so to speak.
Hegel's critique of concrete universality: he believes
that the concrete content of the world derives from the universal
notion. (I.e. his idealism). Zizek explains this via Deleuze's
anti-Hegelian concept of repetition. Deleuze claims that the new
emerges out of absolute repetition. (The example of a new melody
arising virtually out of the pure repetition of a melody by a virtuoso
pianist playing Augenmusik).
What changes is what you don't hear, what is written only for the eyes.
This is what Deleuze means by virtuality. In the same way, the
ideological revolution consists in changing the implicit rules, the
background, even if we say the same thing the virtual resonance is a
different one.
I suppose this radical change can be linked to what he says before
about historicity—it is not possible to think again the same after Hegel (or
composing the same way after Schoenberg, as Adorno said).
Another example of Deleuze's virtuality: a bad book by Doctorow adapted
by a bad film nonetheless gives rise to a virtual effect: through the
(bad) film we (retroactively) intuit the good book which should have
existed but didn't, except now, in a virtual state.
(One
might add here Benjamin's notion of the original modified by the
translation, or the deconstructive meanings identified by De Man I comment upon here. Later, Zizek brings up another example of virtuality from
Benjamin: the meanings of works of art which can arise only with
historical distance, as they are snapshots for which the developing
technique has not been yet invented).
Yet another example: Bergson's fascination with the fact that a war
(the 1st World War) could actually emerge, from a collective idea, only an idea,
to an actual reality—reality as a shock in its actual efficiency. What
was thought but seemed impossible, suddenly becomes possible and
necessary, in a retroactive way. (Like Zizek's military service:
actually being there and its
naturalization). Bergson's beautiful formula: not a standard
linear logic of a possibility among many becoming actualized, but
rather...
... something that we considered (symbolically) impossible actually happens, (—Let us say, the independence of Catalonia, just imagining—) and then, when it happens, it becomes possible.
This is the best definition of what Lacan calls an act:
something which seems impossible when it happens, but retroactively
creates its own conditions of possibility. E.g. Nixon's
visit to China.
Bergson's formulation: a reality inserts itself into the past as a
possibility, farther and farther, it inserts itself as having been
possible all the time, but only when it emerges it begins to "always
already have been" (Two Sources of
Morality and Religion).
The example of being in love: your previous life is structured as if
waiting for this moment. Jean-Pierre Dupuy's notion on the theory of
confronting catastrophes: one must accept them as inevitable and change
the very past, working retroactively. (Muy en línea con mi
propia teoría de las catástrofes).
Hegel too: in development a thing becomes what it already was. (Well,
that's a way of reading him—perhaps he's actually failing to articulate
the retroactive argument, but he says it NOW, in a way, you know,
retroactively...).
(And now Zizek goes on to quote T. S.
Eliot, and Borges, etc.—pity David Lodge didn't get credit for
that! or myself, since we're at it, with Borges & Kafka & the rest.
Really we're treading the same ground, only I "been there, done that"
in the 1990s...)
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" as read by Zizek: radical change restructures not just the
present but the past as well. Any
radical event radically recreates its own possibility. Hegel's
historical idealism means not only that you are influenced by the past:
you change the past, not the real past, but the past as it exists now.
The properly Hegelian interpretation of the relationship between
necessity and contingency. Not "reality is necessary but it realizes
itself in contingent ways" i.e. "a necessity of contingency"—this is a
vulgar Marxist interpretation, e.g. Napoleon as a contingent historical
figure which embodies a historical necessity. Instead, the deeper
Hegelian insight is the contingency
of necessity. Things become
necessary in a way which is ultimately contingent. The
necessity emerges retroactively.
"Judith Butler's" question: Is Zizek retroactively creating the Hegel
he needs? (Listen to the solution,
between the lines:)
If you come too close to things, reality blurs. Both in video games and
in reality. Some aspects of reality have been left "unprogrammed". The
best argument against reductionism, is that you cannot reduce
indefinitely, things get blurry. If there's a lesson in Heisenberg etc.
it's the incompleteness of reality itself. And this is the basic
recognition of Hegel's, his basic operation: our epistemological
limitation; we solve the
problem not by solving it, but by showing how the
problem itself is its own
solution.
Let's leave it there.
But the lessons go on, slowly petering
out...:
Adorno claims that you cannot find a global unifying theory which takes
either global mechanisms or actual phenomena as the ultimate
reality—neither Hegel nor the phenomenologists so to speak, taking the
other way round, going from phenomena and authentic experience to its
sedimentation. (From a Lacanian point of view there is not basic
authentic experience). Adorno's solution: it's wrong to try to develop
a global theory, because what we misperceive as a lack in our
understanding of reality is itself the actual experience of
reality.
Zizek's critique of "alternate modernity" and alternative capitalisms:
they want capitalism without paying the price. There was already an
experiment in that line: Fascism. The Hegelian interpretation of the
relationship between universal and particular here is close to Deleuze:
the universal is a question, and the particulars are the answers. This
is the way Marxists should assess capitalism: not responding to
capitalism in general, but to specific modes of capitalism. The
struggle is not between the particulars, the struggle is between the
particulars and the universal, the particulars are possible answers to
the deadlock caused by the general. This is what Hegel means by
concrete universality—a struggle between universality and its
particular content.
This lecture is followed by another one on The Interaction with the Other in
Hegel (and in lots of parentethical digressions as well I guess).
—oOo—
También aquí:
_____. "Slavoj Žižek, The Return to Hegel." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 31 Oct. 2012.*
http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2012/10/slavoj-zizek-return-to-hegel.html
2012 DISCONTINUED 2025 – Online at the Internet Archive.*
2025
_____. "Slavoj Žižek, The Return to Hegel." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 20 Dec. 2022, 20 Jan. 2025.*
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/zizekreturn.html
2022
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/zizekreturn.pdf
2025
_____. "Slavoj Žižek, The Return to Hegel." SSRN 24 March 2025.*
https://ssrn.com/abstract=5107607 http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5107607
2025
Continental Philosophy eJournal 24 March 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Continental-Philosophy.html
2025
History of Western Philosophy eJournal 24 March 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/History-of-Western-Philosophy.html
2025
Social & Political Philosophy eJournal 23 March 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Social-Political-Philosophy.html
2025
_____. "Slavoj Zizek, The Return to Hegel." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 24 March 2025.*
https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2025/03/slavoj-zizek-return-to-hegel.html
2025
2025
Retropost, 2005: You Did Not Come - Me sin You - Añicos
You Did Not Come
Hoy toca un experimento en creative rewriting. As an example of the simple case, let us take one of the finest of modern lyrical poems, Mr. Hardy's "A Broken Appointment":
- You did not come,
- And Marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.
- Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
- Than that I thus found lacking in your make
- That high compassion which can overbear
- Reluctance for pure loving-kindness' sake
- Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
- You did not come.
- You love not me,
- And love alone can lend you loyalty:
- I know and knew it. But unto the store
- Of human deeds divine in all but name
- Was it not worth a little hour or more
- To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
- To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
- You love me not?
- You did not come,
- And Marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.
- Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
- Than that I thus found lacking in your make
- That high compassion which can overbear
- Reluctance for pure loving-kindness' sake
- Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
- You did not come.
- You love not me,
- And love alone can lend you loyalty:
- I know and knew it. But unto the store
- Of human deeds divine in all but name
- Was it not worth a little hour or more
- To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
- To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
- You love me not?
¿Verdad que no me ha salido mal? Se aceptan sugerencias para el título, que, claro, tiene que ser distinto, ya que la temática es muy distinta... ("You did not come" sin más, quizá).
Espero que los herederos de Thomas Hardy, a quien recomiendo sinceramente como poeta y como novelista, me disculpen este uso algo chusco de un poema original de otro autor, pero hay que convenir en que este tipo de (re)escritura implica, necesariamente, basarse en un poema ya existente. Si me lo piden, ya lo quitaré de la web. Bueno, quitaré el original, no el que yo he reescrito, claro, de ese soy yo el autor.
De
paso,
les agradecería que me aclarasen si en efecto el
corazón de Thomas Hardy fue devorado por un gato, o si se
trata de
una leyenda literaria que ha llegado a mis oídos. Lo que desde
luego no había oído, y me ha dejado estupefacto, es el gusto de
su segunda
esposa en materia de pendientes.
Me Sin You
En otro orden de cosas, por primera vez una persona me ha solicitado
que no se haga mención de su persona en este blog. No puedo decir
quién ha sido, claro. Ah, la censura... uno tiene que hacer lo posible
por convivir con ella: vivimos en sociedad, y eso requiere muchas
concesiones,
transigir humildemente para evitar nefastas consecuencias...
Bonus tracks: Como comentario adicional al poema de Hardy, se
me ha ocurrido un minipoema en Spanglish:
-
Missing you
-
Me sin you.
-
You's in me
-
You sin you
-
- Añicos
- Pero como la tinta especial para blogs va cara, aún se pueden hacer poemas más cortos. Ya lo dijo Gracián: lo bueno bueno, breve. Este también va de missing; se titula "Romper":
-
-
Años
-
Añicos
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