La escritura retroactiva de la historia: Žižek sobre Hegel

Abstract

Žižek affirms Hegel’s present-day value since he understands that the transcendental Kantian discovery, opening up an abyss between subject and substance, constitutes the ‘traumatic core’ of contemporary philosophy and that the Hegelian response to it is the only satisfying one. This contribution tries, first of all, to explain the Žižekian interpretation of this response as a “metaphysics of the not-all.” According to Žižek, Hegel faces this transcendental challenge, inasmuch as he covers the distance between substance and subject, but in doing so, he demonstrates that their relation has the form of a paradox or that their unity rests on a cleft. Starting from here, the article explains the Žižekian reconstruction of the dialectical movement as a ‘run-in’ in which logos (of the subject) clashes with that (substantial) cleft that transcends it and, nonetheless, proves itself as its innermost core. This ‘run-in’, thus, enlightens the dialectical inversion as a radical overturn, which guarantees the opening of sense. Finally, by translating this linguistic structure into terms of action, this paper makes clear why Žižek defends that for Hegel the failure that essentially belongs to action, and because of which action goes necessarily through the ‘moment zero’ of history, guarantees the capacity action has to rewrite history and open up a new age.