Abstract
This aperçu by Lacan can serve as our guiding principle: beware of all-too-easy attempts at “overcoming” metaphysics! There are three (and only three) key philosophers in the history of (Western) metaphysics: Plato, Descartes, Hegel. The proof of their privileged status is their extraordinary position in the series of philosophers: each of the three not only designates a clear break with the past, but also casts his long shadow on the thinkers who follow him — they can all be conceived as a series of negations/oppositions of/to his position. It was already Foucault who noted that the entire history of Western philosophy can be defined as the history of rejections of Platonism: in a homologous way, the entire modern philosophy can be conceived as the history of rejections of Cartesianism, from subtle corrections (Malebranche, Spinoza) to outright dismissals. With Hegel, things are, if anything, even more obvious: what united all that comes after Hegel is the opposition to the specter of Hegel’s “panlogicism.”
I don’t much like hearing that we have gone beyond Hegel, the way one hears we have gone beyond Descartes. We go beyond everything and always end up in the same place.
– Jacques Lacan, Séminaire II: Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse1
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Notes
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton 1991), 71.
Alain Badiou, La République de Platon: dialogue en un prologue, seize chapitres et un épilogue (Paris: Fayard, 2012).
David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (New York: Free Press, 1998).
See Alain Badiou, Eloge de l’amour (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 15.
Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2006), 9.
Translation quoted from Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 7–8. In the Encyclopedia also, Hegel mentions the “night-like abyss within which a world of infinitely numerous images and presentations is preserved without being in consciousness” (PSS 3:153). Hegel’s historical source here is Jakob Böhme.
Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1958), 12: 1–84.
For a more detailed reading of this notion, see Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 1996), 13–91.
Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, in Collected Plays, vol. 2, ed. Ralph Manheim and John Willett (New York: Vintage, 1977), scene 9, pp. 222–23.
G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 44–45.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property? ed. and trans. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 13–14.
G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Detective Stories,” in The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 6.
Richard Wagner, Jesus of Nazareth and Other Writings, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 303.
G. K. Chesterton, “Christmas and the Aesthetes,” in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 1: Heretics, Orthodoxy, and the Blatchford Controversies (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 88.
Jela Krecic, “Philosophy, Fantasy, Film” (Ph.D. diss., University of Ljubljana, 2008).
Robert B. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 332–34.
Jacques Lacan, “La vérité surgit de la méprise,” in Séminaire I: Les écrits techniques de Freud, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 287–99.
Augustine of Hippo, The Augustine Catechism: The Enchiridion on Faith Hope and Charity, trans. Bruce Harbert (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City, 1999), §27.
Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XX: Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 45.
G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi (London: Continuum, 2001), 27–29.
Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14.
Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 367.
For a more detailed description of Hegel’s triad of reflection, see Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 201–31.
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Žižek, S. (2014). Plato, Descartes, Hegel: Three Philosophers of Event. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_29
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