Getting serious with finiteness

Abstract

Žižeks work on Heidegger has not been examined in the same way as his work on Hegel, Lacan, Marx and Kant. In order to shed light on his political thought – oscillating between a heroic Leninism and a subversive Ideologiekritik – we are reconstructing his critique of Heidegger as it follows from the first chapter of The Ticklish Subject. In that we want to show how his critique is essentially Kantian – Which means for Žižek: A critique that doesn’t retreat from the full consequences of the subject’s finiteness. That is excactly what Žižek traces in both Heidegger and Kant, focussing around the role of transcendental imagination. In a last step we are showing how his doubled political position follows from this and hint at the intuition that his heroic Leninism itself could be conceived as a sort of retreat from those very consequences.