Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism (original) (raw)

2014, Open Humanities Press

In Ontological Catastrophe, Joseph Carew takes up the central question guiding Slavoj Žižek's philosophy: How could something like phenomenal reality emerge out of the meaninglessness of the Real? Carefully reconstructing and expanding upon his controversial reactualization of German Idealism, Carew argues that Žižek offers us an original, but perhaps terrifying, response: experience is possible only if we presuppose a prior moment of breakdown as the ontogenetic basis of subjectivity. Drawing upon resources found in Žižek, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-Kantian philosophy, Carew thus develops a new critical metaphysics—a metaphysics which is a variation upon the late German Idealist theme of balancing system and freedom, realism and idealism, in a single, self-reflexive theoretical construct—that challenges our understanding of nature, culture, and the ultimate structure of reality. Table of Contents: Introduction: A Metaphysical Archaeology of the Psychoanalytico-Cartesian Subject Part One: Death Drive 1 The Madness of the Symbolic: Transcendental Materialism and the Ambiguity of the Real 1.1 A (Transcendental) Materialism of the Psychoanalytical Subject 1.2 The Lacanian Subject and the Irreducible Ambiguity of the Real 1.3 From Logcio-Dialectical Simultaneity to the Ontogenesis of the Subject 2 Grasping the Vanishing Mediator between the Real and the Ideal: Žižek and the Unconscious Truth of German 2.1 The Methodology of a Psychoanalytical Dialogue: Or, Lacan with Hegel and Hegel with Lacan 2.2 A Metaphysics of the Real: An Hegelian or a Schellingian Project? 3 Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Transcendental Subjectivity: Towards a New Materialism 3.1 Postmodernism and an Uncanny Defence of Transcendentalism 3.2 Idealism and its Shadow: Materialism in the Cracks 3.3 A Metaphysics of the Disjunctive “and” 4 The Problem of Nature in the Lacanian Subject: The Obscure Origins of the Symbolic 4.1 An Uncanny Pair: The Cartesian and Psychoanalytical Subjects 4.2 Lacan, antiphusis, and the Parasite of Images and Words 4.3 German Idealism, Psychoanalysis, and the Quest for the Birthplace of the Transcendental Part Two: Nature Torn Apart 5 Kant, Todestrieb, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Unruly Basis of Transcendental Freedom 5.1 From the Rottenness of Nature... 5.2 ...to a Denaturalized Monstrosity 5.3 Kant, Unruliness, and the Cry of the Newborn 6 From Transcendental Philosophy to Substance as Subject: Hegel and the Psychotic Night of the World 6.1 Fichte and the Frailty of Freedom 6.2 Metaphysics in the Aftermath of Freedom: The Case of Spinoza 6.3 The Suffocating Deficiency of a Naturphilosophie 6.4 The Night of the World/A Monism Bursting at its Seams 7 The Logic of Transcendental Materialism: Schelling and the Spectral Other Side of German Idealism 7.1 The Hegelian Recoil, The Schellingian Breakthrough 7.2 The Weltalter and the Systematization of Freedom 7.3 The Problem of the Beginning Itself: Schelling's Uncanny Response to Idealism 7.4 Grund and Existence: The Pulsating Heart of Nature and the Upward Spiral of Human Temporality 8 When the World Opens its Eyes: The Traumatic Fissure of Ontological Catastrophe 8.1 Desire, the Disease-Stricken Body of Being 8.2 Malfunction, Mal-adaptation, Breakdown: Žižek and the Sciences 8.3 Terror, Perplexity, and the Awakening of the World 9 The Abyss of Unconscious Decision: Schelling's Weltalter and the Psychoanalytical Horror of Substance as Subject 9.1 Into the Void: The Frenzy of God's Self-Diremption 9.2 That Which is in Schelling More than Schelling Himself— Žižek 9.3 A Mytho-Poetics of Creation and the Seducing Hand of Fantasy 10 Radicalizing the Subject: Substance Gasping for Breath, the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics, and the Žižekian Unconscious 10.1 From the Psychoanalytical Purification of the Theosophic to Substance Gasping for Breath 10.2 Eppur si muove: Ontological Dislocation and the Metaphysics of the Void 10.3 The Act of Uneasy Self-Begetting: Entscheidung and the Paradoxical Self-Positing of Freedom Part Three: Overcoming Idealism 11 From Radical Idealism to Critical Metaphysics: How Idealists Write Being's Poem 11.1 Lacan and the Prison-House of the Symbolic 11.2 The Hegelian Real-as-lack: The Painful March of Ontological Solipsism 11.3 A Call for a Critical Metaphysics 11.4 Being's Poem: Speculative Philosophy and the Mytho-Poetic Parallax Shift 12 The Deadlocks of Ontological Catastrophe: The Cases of Naturphilosophie, Anton-Babinski Syndrome, and Tarte à la crème 12.1 The Schellingian Real-as-Excess: Iain Hamilton Grant, Naturphilosophie, and the Interior Involutions of Being 12.2 Anton-Babinski Syndrome: Slavoj Žižek's Paradoxical Overcoming of Idealism 12.3 Fichte's Laughter, Henri Maldiney, and the Necessity of a “Successful” Psychotic Thinking