Žižek and the Kantian gesture: Parallax and beyond

Abstract

Early in his 1993 book Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Žižek asks contemporary philosophy to “repeat the Kantian gesture.” The implication is that (much like Plato did with the Sophists) Kant accepted the critique of metaphysics made by David Hume, affirming it in an unexpected positive sense. The analogous gesture for a would-be Kant in our time would be to accept deconstruction’s insistence on the contingency of meaning while treating contingency not as a failing, but as the very stuff of truth itself. For Žižek this is precisely what Jacques Lacan has already done, and this makes Lacan the pivotal thinker of our era. Yet as we follow Žižek’s pursuit of this theme in his recent article “The Parallax of Ontology” (an extract from his book Sex and the Failed Absolute), we catch sight of a new direction in Žižek’s thinking. His previous model of parallax in terms of two separate and irreconcilable realities seems to shift toward a new emphasis on the differential becoming of the two, rather than their paradoxical co-existence.