The Positive Unconscious : in Search of the Matrix

Abstract

In a self-interview, Žižek once posed the question whether ‘from Foucauldian historicist premises’ it would not be justified to criticise his own writing as eternalizing ‘a historically specific, limited logic of symbolization’. He rejected the reproach of ahistoricity by drawing a line between ‘historicity proper’ and historicism. Historicity proper, he argued, was predicated on a dialectical relationship with the Real as the unhistorical traumatic kernel that returns as the Same through all historical epochs, albeit ‘not as an underlying Essence but as a rock that trips up every attempt to integrate it into the symbolic order’. The Real, in its unhistoricity, would be constitutive of the very order of symbolic historicity, setting ‘in motion one new symbolization after another’ (Žižek, 1994a, 199). In this context, Žižek came up with a concise definition: ‘historicism’, he suggested, equals ‘historicity minus the unhistorical kernel of the Real’, the latter being the ‘blind spot of historicism’ (Žižek, 2001a, 81). Did Foucault “overlook” the dimension of the Real? Not at all. On the contrary, Foucault was well aware that ‘there, in the midst of [discourse] is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation’ (Foucault, 1970, 16); ‘a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, … a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself’ (Foucault, 1965, 288). How can we account for such obvious discrepancy?