Politics After Finitude: Žižek’s Redoubling of the Real and its Implications for The Left

Abstract

Slavoj Žižek, alongside Quinton Meillassoux, takes up the position that correlationism – the idea that one can only know the world as it appears for one’s subjective perception of it – fails to account for its own articulation, and thus depoliticizes the formal space from which it can arise. Through his reading of Hegel and locating of the Kantian thing-in-itself within reality, Žižek claims that he can subvert Kantian correlationism and its consequent political ‘celebration of failure’.[i] This paper, however, argues that Žižek’s Hegelian move, with its corresponding notion of the Act, fails to politicize the formal space that he criticizes Kantianism and the contemporary left for failing to consider. That is, Žižek’s alternative, his use of Marxism to delineate and politicize the formal Real space of capital, falls short. His Marxist construction and analysis of capital, since it relies upon the labor theory of value, which Žižek himself criticizes, results in an unwarranted speculation. Without a plausible construction, his claim to avoid Kantian impotence has little ground to stand on. The left is forced back to the drawing board; without Žižek’s alternative it is forced to revise Žižek’s concept of the Act, Marxist construction, or re-confront the political limits of Kantian finitude and correlationism.

[i] Žižek, Enjoyment as a political Factor, xii, xvii.