The Universal Exception by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Having read Zizek for over a decade, this work speaks out much more to me than it would had this been Zizek’s latest book. Here we see many figures of reason, a display of logic some of which did not make it to later works. Others of which show us how some tendencies may be further developed. The heady nature of this subject, an application of the theory of exception to politics can be summarized as the universal exception which must be removed before knowledge is generated.
This applies directly to politics as politics is nothing if not knowledge of others. Our ability to get along with them, to know them, to be able to understand (contain) large masses of people, trends and response to them with the understanding of policies and edicts that will effectively shape how we understand and get along with one another. In a way, Zizek is saying that we can understand our context but we cannot understand ourselves. Or we understand ourselves but not our context. The point of view needs a basis of comparison, even if it is about the point of view itself. This basis becomes invisible, absolute and profound as it is literally understood as its own shadow.
In a way, since this null point is still being shaped; the less interesting parts of this book are the parts where he lapses into his familiar terms, you get a sense that this exception is still new to him, a fragile point of hypnosis which captivates his full attention. As he gets into parallax gap, and then less than nothing, Zizek comes to understand that point has having any and every content possible. Never mind that he generally prefers the same hero worship. This worship, as silly as it may be can only be understood as a repetition of the difference he highlights. It works as both justification for the difference (it has appeared twice, as a repeat) but also as a tool of refinement in which Zizek can calibrate the theory, in this case to itself. A proper dialectical motion would follow in which Zizek insisted that Hegel was the first mistake, a random, chance, pure genius, whereas his repetition was a recognition of pure genius, the first true calibration point, in which a theory can be explicated and the point of split; the cut can be highlighted.
It would follow then, that our third effort, would be the chance to break free of the constraints of that cut, the chance to realize it as more than a singularity but a world logic. This would be the finding of a new transcendental model but only because its reflection requires that we jump back one step to justify Hegel, leaving the Byzantine ramblings of Kant. And from there, we can abstract to the method of Descartes and the ancient Greeks themselves, recognizing that the bridge between Descartes unnamed transcendental which affords only differences that self-evident and Kant’s Transcendental logic in which the functioning of that self evidence is made possible by the interstice view of the excess of various faculties’s interactions as these interactions are only visible outside of all these spheres of localized logics. Of course there is Understanding, which is self evident, Reason which extends itself into paradox, and Imagination which is spontaneous to be unpredictable. Each of these paradoxes wraps up the same faculties within their own immanence as to merely describe various anti-nomies themselves. These facial “black holes” that looking into another’s eyes or the unknown orifices in logic always present different realms of incoherence from the point of view of the outside looking in. We never get a full sense of our own arbitrariness without eliminating the possibility of there being strict rules. All topographies are distinguished by their handling of zeros. At first structure, then to texture. The procedure is logical but can be expressed via its own displacement, of which its kind of regularity is its logic. This then, becomes the genius of Descartes, as the first leap into dimensional mapping. To further this trend, we need to proceed into pure multiples.
If Liebniz understood that a curve was where any arbitrary measurement that was much like any other arbitrary measurement it follows that we’d have to reverse our way back out to get back to full points of content, back to ‘pataphysics and immanence. This is a move that Badiou and Deleuze do, but which I think we will find Zizek going to, but only if he is willing to give up the hero worshiping imposition of making a theoretical cut that includes too much of itself. The only point that creates this particular world as being what it is, as a limit to its maximal value (with no limit on its minimal) is the universal exception, the bulwark which we push off from, in order to jumpstart our content.
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