Visiting Hegel at Dusk: A Conversation with Slavoj Žižek

Abstract

This interview endeavors to understand Slavoj Žižek’s philosophical theses on dialectical materialism from the point of view of aleatory materialism. The contents of the interview are philosophically based, despite detours through varied topics such as politics, ecology, and communism. Throughout, Žižek asserts Hegel’s philosophical materialism, which has been overlooked by philosophers in general. Through dialectical retroactivity, Žižek maintains that we have finally found a nonteleological dialectics that is not external to Hegel but is found within his philosophy. Throughout the conversation, Žižek offers concrete examples to complex categories such as absolute recoil, which he defines as the cause being “an effect of its effects.” In addition, Žižek presents what he sees as the deficiency in Althusser’s aleatory materialism, that it represents, in his opinion, a simplistic interpretation of Hegel. Žižek believes that Hegel is the only true materialist alternative to Marx, who never managed to free himself from a teleological view of communism.

Key Words:

• Aleatory Materialism
• Dialectical Materialism
• Louis Althusser
• G. W. F. Hegel
• Slavoj Žižek

Notes

1 “Our wager is that this, precisely, is what happened with the ‘official’ post-Hegelian anti-philosophical break (Schopenhauer-Kierkegaard-Marx): although it presents itself as a break with idealism as embodied in its Hegelian climax, it ignored a crucial dimension of Hegel’s thought; that is, ultimately amounts to a desperate attempt to go on thinking as if Hegel had not happened. The hole left by this absence of Hegel is then, of course, filled in with the ridiculous caricature of Hegel the ‘absolute idealist’ who ‘possessed Absolute Knowledge’” (Žižek 2012, 194).

2 It is likely that Žižek is referring to Essays in Self-Criticsm and Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.

3 This is a generalization but an understandable one, given the context of the interview. However, the reader must keep in mind that Althusser’s philosophical interest in Hegel never ceased but preoccupied him all his life. In a semibiography, Étienne Balibar (2010, 35) affirms this claim: “But later I felt a certain anger when Althusser’s doctoral thesis on Hegel was published … under the immediate influence of Althusser we had hardly read anything by Hegel, yet he himself knew this material by heart! In a certain sense he had deprived us of a source of philosophical inspiration which was very close to him.”

4 In fact, Althusser has always shown an understanding of Hegel that could be considered close to Žižek’s own interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy. Two quotations should suffice to prove that: “Marx was close to Hegel in his insistence in rejecting every philosophy of the Origin and of the Subject, whether rationalist, empirical or transcendental” (Althusser 1976, 178). Furthermore, Althusser explicitly showed an understanding of Hegelian retroactive dialectics: “If the Hegelian dialectic rejects every Origin … where Being is immediately identified with Nothingness, it projects this into the End of a Telos which in return creates, within its own process, its own Origin and its own Subject” (180; emphasis added). What Althusser criticized was Hegel’s retroactive dialectics, not a simplistic caricature of him. While Hegel posits the Origin retroactively, Althusser’s aleatory materialism retroactively posits the nothingness of Origin within the Origin posited retroactively.