Freedom qua Spontaneity:
The Lacanian Subject in the Critique of Pure Reason
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Žižek and the ‘pre-synthetic’
Our introduction indicated that in The Ticklish Subject, Žižek predicates transcendental apperception and transcendental imagination in very similar terms, locating in both the ‘mysterious root’ of the subject’s capacity for ‘spontaneous’ and ‘radically free’ activity. While this is perplexing in itself, an additional curiosity is that this particular discussion of spontaneity stands as somewhat of an exception in Žižek’s oeuvre: before and since that book’s publication in 1999, there is little to no further treatment of spontaneity in terms of a confrontation between these two Kantian faculties. To be sure, as we also noted above, Žižek has always consistently maintained that the proper (Lacanian) notion of the subject as such is the transcendental subject of apperception. But in view of the fact that the free, spontaneous act of the subject is inseparable from Lacanian ethical activity – a highly important area of concern for Žižek – it may be surprising that a further interpretation of freedom at the level of the first Critique has not been pursued beyond this initial effort.24
One reason which suggests itself is implied from the results of Žižek’s first Critique analysis. Žižek began his academic career as a Heideggarian, so it is not surprising that he follows the lead of his former master with similar focus on the Transcendental Power of the Imagination. Žižek not only uses it to initiate his own analysis, but even after radically departing from Heidegger’s interpretation, he continues to specify the subject’s spontaneous activity in similar terms. This parting of company can be reflectively marked in the different ways in which they read the term ‘synthesis.’ As we saw above, for Heidegger the power of Transcendental Imagination lies in its pure synthetic activity. That is, pure synthesis is the key to the (rational) human subject’s capacity for spontaneously interacting with its world, in the sense of ‘unifying,’ or ‘bringing together’ that which is given at the lowest level of intuition, through a conceptual universalizing at the level of understanding, all the way to our highest capacity – reason – which seeks to provide a rational explanation of our entire experience. In contrast, for Žižek the ‘synthesis’ of the Power of Transcendental Imagination is to be read simultaneously as a destructive capacity. Žižek claims that this negative aspect to the power of imagination is overlooked not only by Heidegger, but by Kant as well. As to the claim of Kant’s oversight, this would go far in explaining why Žižek has since ceased an analysis of the first Critique for a Kantian expression for a proper notion of spontaneity. Strictly speaking, it is simply not there.25 Moreover, Kant ‘silently passes over [this] crucial “negative” feature of imagination’ and does so with his very endeavor to elaborate the synthesis of imagination. (Žižek 1999: 29)26 Thus, if there is any truth to Heidegger’s contention that Kant ‘shrunk back’ from the abyss he opened up with the pure synthetic power of imagination in the B-Deduction27, for Žižek, it is not so much the abyss of this power qua synthesis, but the other, far more traumatic abyss behind this abyss that frightened Kant even in the A-edition of the Critique. What we might call an ‘abyss of the abyss,’ Žižek has termed the ‘pre-synthetic imagination.’ (31) To understand this result, we must first turn to Žižek’s reading of certain philosophical figurations found in the work of Hegel.
As is well known, Žižek’s general thesis is that Hegel is the most consequential of Kantians, a Kantian who has thoroughly thought out his theoretical system.28 So it comes as no surprise that Žižek begins his solution to a problem present in Kant with references of Hegel’s work. In fact, the two references he gives us are quite familiar, having found their way in many other Žižekian texts. The first of these is the ‘night of the world’ quote which is used to illustrate the negative, disruptive power of the ‘pre-rational/pre-discursive confused immersion’ that occurs within the ‘purely subjective Interior,’ which ‘disperses continuous reality into a confused multitude of “partial objects”’ such as ‘bloody heads’ and ‘white ghastly apparitions’. Here is Žižek’s key philosophical reference to illustrate the traumatic, negative side lurking behind the power of transcendental imagination that he argues has been missed in most accounts. Hegel here quite colorfully paints this power in its ‘most elementary and violent’ capacity, revealing its ‘empty freedom.’ The second quote is the one in which Hegel is seen as praising the ‘abstract discursive activity of Understanding’ as the source of the same negative, decomposing power just attributed to the subject’s imaginative faculty. Now, if in the first quote, this most primal freedom (ie, spontaneity) has to do with imagination and in the second, with the understanding (apperception), this merely repeats, at the most basic level, the initial question posed in our introduction to this paper. So again, which of the two faculties is dominant? Žižek’s solution is simple: we must think both the ideas expressed in the two quotes at once in order to isolate spontaneity. That is, the experience of ghostly apparitions that appear in the ‘night of the world’ are a momentary manifestation of that power of negativity by which ‘an accident as such’ detaches from its organic context and ‘attain[s] an existence of its own and a separate freedom.’ Yet at the same time this solution is confusing, since Žižek locates such a radical freedom in the aforementioned ‘pre-synthetic imagination.’ (29–31) Evidently, despite the expressed link between this most negative subjective gesture to both imagination and apperception, it is somehow doubly attributable to the sensible faculty of imagination. So now the question becomes: is this just a nominal inheritance from Žižek’s Heideggerian past, or is there a more substantial rationale for the use of this terminology?
To isolate this ‘pre-synthetic’ element, Kant is thought to have proceeded too quickly in assuming that the manifold in intuition is simply given externally, so the task of the subject becomes one of synthesizing this given dispersal into a Whole, from the most primal synthesis of imagination, through a synthetic application of the categories of understanding, to the final unification in the regulative Ideas of Reason. This is the bird’s eye view of the synthesizing activity of a subject’s experience of the universe, of his efforts to bring it into one rationally explained and organic structure. Within this overall picture of interplay between analysis and synthesis, of cycles of breaking down the given and subsequent re-unification into something new, the problem becomes for Kant (and for his interpreters like Allison and Heidegger), a consideration of which paths to the Whole are the most sound: should we determine the imagination as a spontaneous synthesis of the sensuous manifold found in intuition, unifying it into an initial object which is then decomposed (analyzed) by discursive understanding into universal (categorial) pure concepts; or alternatively, should this trajectory be reversed, with imagination disrupting the given manifold in a primal analysis, which is then brought back together in preparation for a new rational Whole? As Žižek writes, there seems to be an inherent antagonism between the two faculties. Using a favored metaphor, he implies that the choice appears restricted to either the understanding ‘healing the wound’ inflicted initially by imagination, or the understanding as that which actually wounds the spontaneous unifying act of imagination, mortifying that unity into ‘bits and pieces.’ This restriction of only two possible choices is lifted, however, when Žižek makes full use of this metaphor: ‘the wound can be healed only by the spear that inflicted it’ means in this case that the so-called ‘given’ multitude or manifold that the synthesis of imagination endeavors to unify ‘is already the result of imagination itself, of its disruptive power.’ (32) Let us more closely examine this tautological expression, as well as its resulting consequences.
To propose that the very synthetic or ‘healing’ gesture of imagination is simultaneously the very same gesture that inflicts the wound to be synthesized (healed) nevertheless gives precedence to the negative, ‘wounding’ gesture. This is true for two reasons, both contrary to Kant’s basic thinking. That Kant held all analysis to always presuppose synthesis is clear. [B131] Yet Žižek gives precedence to the analytic, or the negative, disruptive aspect, since common sense tells us that ‘elements must first be dismembered in order to open up the space for the [synthetic] endeavor to bring them together again.’ (32) But his second reason is far more important and plays off Heidegger’s notion of the subject’s irreducible finitude: because of this finitude, the subject’s synthetic endeavor, in itself, is always minimally disruptive. Synthetic activity is ‘violent’ in the sense of being a contingent, erratic, eccentric and wholly external imposition on the multitude. It is never the case that we can take a neutral meta-position, adopting that ‘bird’s eye’ view of things that would allow us to act without passion and impartially discern the inherent ‘organic’ connections between the membra disjecta of the intuited manifold. To explain this, Žižek theorizes that ‘every synthetic unity is based on an act of “repression,” and therefore generates some indivisible remainder: it imposes as unifying feature some “unilateral” moment that “breaches the symmetry.”’ (33)
The main consequence is that there is no neutral manifold simply existing ‘out there’ that is not always-already minimally synthesized by the activity of transcendental imagination. That is, a pure, pre-synthetic state-of-affairs can never be encountered. Each and every starting point for the subject is always-already ‘touched’ by the imagination’s disruptive activity and thus such a starting point of the imagination’s synthetic activity is ‘merely’ the presupposition of imagination. More specifically, the zero-level, mythical manifold untouched by the imagination is ‘nothing but pure imagination itself, imagination at its most violent.’ This is Hegel’s ‘night of the world,’ a realm in which ‘the “unruliness” of the subject’s abyssal freedom... violently explodes reality into a dispersed floating of membra disjecta.’ (33) Žižek provides us with a rather claustrophobic, even autistic-like image of the impossibility of the subject ever exiting the closed circle of the imagination. Using Hegelian logic once again, he argues that the pure presupposition of the ‘stuff’ the synthetic imagination works on – that primordial Thing which is mistakenly assumed to be externally given from without and which supposedly holds no regard for the subject – actually turns out to be a pure product of the subject’s positing activity. It is imagination at its most violent, the result of the imagination in its most pure and negative state.29 (68n.35)
A question should occur to us at this point. Exactly how does Žižek know of this ‘pre-synthetic’ power of imagination, when Kant and Heidegger and presumably all subsequent interpreters have overlooked it? What justifies Žižek’s radical re-conceptualization of the synthetic activity of the imagination via this Hegelian/Lacanian inspired re-reading, that it is to be conceived as inseparable from a disruptive, violently negative gesture of dismemberment? We begin to see the contours of an answer through his general comments on the Kantbook, which he endeavors to situate within Heidegger’s larger project of Being and Time. Heidegger’s work on Kant is to be highly commended for confronting the ‘abyss of radical subjectivity announced in Kantian transcendental imagination’ despite the fact Heidegger later ‘recoiled from this abyss into his thought of the historicity of Being.’ (23) According to Žižek, Heidegger clearly perceived Kant’s shrinking back from the abyss of transcendental freedom (spontaneity) precisely when Kant claimed that our ‘negative’ representation of that abyss (produced in the frustrating experience of failing to grasp our noumenal selves) is proof that we do have a noumenal side that transcends all phenomenal causality, a side that is ‘out there,’ but forever out of reach. Rather, for Heidegger, such an experience of the ungraspable noumenal side of subjectivity occurs within the subject’s temporal horizon, the transcendental horizon which forever marks us with finitude. That is, Kant all too often regresses into traditional metaphysics by locating spontaneity in the noumenal Beyond, but Heidegger realizes this is something that ‘appears to the subject within his finite temporal experience’(26) and so clearly grasps the impossibility of properly locating the mystery of transcendental imagination qua spontaneity with regard to either the phenomenal or noumenal. As we saw above, Žižek claims that even Kant’s own subsequent insight indicates this when he acknowledges that if the subject were to grasp itself in its noumenal capacity, it would be disastrous to his capacity for transcendental spontaneity, turning him into a lifeless automaton. (25) Hence, Heidegger’s great insight is the fact that transcendental imagination is that capacity of subjectivity which undermines the usual Kantian opposition between the phenomenal and the noumenal. For this power of subjectivity is at once finite (characterizing the subject as caught in a phenomenal causal chain, passively affected by sensible images) and spontaneous (self-affecting, indicating an active, positing subject that freely gives birth to such images). (27) This is as we saw above in our concluding discussion on Heidegger: human subjectivity is finite and simultaneously containing within it a unity of pure sensibility (spontaneous receptivity) and pure thinking (receptive spontaneity). So ‘spontaneity itself can be conceived only through this unity with an irreducible element of passive receptivity that characterizes human finitude’30 and Kant’s error was to (all too often) identify transcendental freedom as noumenal. (27–8) Whenever he did so, the abyss of spontaneity was lost to him.
Nevertheless, for all of Žižek’s praise for Heidegger in locating the abyss of spontaneity that Kant subsequently shrunk back from in his later work, Žižek still accuses Heidegger of missing the crucial negative gesture of transcendental imagination, or the ‘true’ abyss, what we called above the ‘abyss of (Heidegger’s) abyss.’ An outline of Žižek’s argument is as follows. In Heidegger’s (legitimate) pre-occupation with providing a critique of Kant’s implicit move away from the domain of imagination – as the latter sought to provide a more purified and rational grounding of subjectivity through the articulation of the Ideas of Reason – Žižek suggests Heidegger overlooks the possibility that his own insistence on the temporal character of the self and its attendant notion of time as pure self-affection actually covers over this most unimaginable abyss of subjectivity. (42) This is so because Heidegger’s analysis of Kant did not move much beyond an analysis of the Transcendental Schema. In other words, his analysis of the logic of the schema was not taken outside the first Critique. The schema, as developed in the Transcendental Analytic, provides for a rather smooth, non-traumatic and relatively ‘successful’ subjective experience in time. But had Heidegger considered the Sublime as the (impossible) schema of the Ideas of Reason, as Žižek suggests one ought to do (and which he feels Kant actually did), Heidegger would have recognized that the synthesis of imagination via the application of a schema is unproblematic only in the first Critique, while in the case of the Sublime, the imagination fails. (61) A further analysis of this failure of imagination in the case of the Sublime qua schema of Ideas of Reason would have ultimately confronted Heidegger with the traumatic ‘night of the world’ that any unproblematic self-affecting synthesis (as had in the first Critique) covers over. Admittedly, Žižek’s argument takes us into the Critique of Judgment. Yet the actual logic used here by Žižek is entirely provided by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, as a further development of this argument will show.
Introductory texts usually note the controversial status in the Kantian literature of the Transcendental Schematism section of the Critique. Some feel that its difficulty and notorious obscurity is perhaps only second to the Transcendental Deduction itself, while others feel it is simply redundant after what the Deduction supposedly established. (Burnham 2007: 105–6)31 Given Heidegger’s sparse direct analysis of the Schematism, he probably falls in the latter camp and there is much to support this contention. After all, although this section is identical in both editions, it holds a much stronger continuity with the A-Deduction and thus accordingly supports Heidegger’s focus on the imagination as it appears in that edition. To be sure, the ‘schema is in itself always only a product of the imagination.’ [A140/B179] Moreover, Kant’s entire effort here seems to purport to show how categories (pure concepts) apply to intuitions, defining the schema – a ‘transcendental time-determination’ – as the mediating term between the two.32 Certainly, Heidegger’s thesis on how the power of imagination is the ‘root’ of the two stems of pure intuition and pure thinking, and how (original) time is the ‘root of that root’ seems well supported by this section of the Critique. To take one example, the schema of a ‘persistence of the real in time’ [A144/B183] combines the category of substance with the pure intuition of time, ultimately providing us the basis of our ‘normal’ empirical experience of the thing-ness of objects. Because of such schema, there are no surprises, no experiences ‘out of the ordinary.’ As Žižek says, ‘[i]n schematized time, nothing really new can emerge – everything is always-already there, and merely deploys its inherent potential.’ (43)
However, Žižek does give us a clue to Heidegger’s criticism of the Schematism in the first Critique. Interested as he is in showcasing the synthetic power of imagination together with temporality as disclosing the subject’s finitude, Heidegger overlooks how his own criticism of Kant’s thinking (that the schema provides us with a smooth, continuous temporal experience, a homogeneous linear succession in which the present dominates the past and future, thereby covering over spontaneity), actually covers over the abyss of the abyss that Žižek claims Heidegger misses. That is to say, Heidegger believes that Kant utilized a traditional metaphysical notion of time as a simple succession of moments, so Kant misses the subject’s finitude with respect to time. (46) Žižek would agree with this, but would go further: the temporal synthesis that Heidegger purports to be the abyssal aspect of imagination overlooked by Kant is itself seen by Žižek as subordinating the more primal, pre-synthetic ‘night of the world’ aspect of imagination in schematism. The latter is covered over by the former. Thus, if Heidegger’s analysis of Kant ends here, this pre-synthetic void will be overlooked since only an analysis of the Sublime qua schema would retroactively reveal the primal void that is hidden by the schematism of time with respect to normal object experience.
It is only now that we are prepared to answer the question posed above, which asks how Žižek has been able to discern the violence of the pre-synthetic of imagination and further, how he has even theorized its existence at the very level of the ‘normalizing’ Transcendental Schematism: he retroactively re-reads this section through the lens of Kant’s discussion of the Sublime in the third Critique, where Kant is to have conceived of the Sublime as a schema of the Ideas of Reason. (39) In this way, Žižek discerns a certain potential crack in even our homogenous, schematized temporal experience of ‘normal’ objects. Before we look at Žižek’s reading of the Kantian Sublime, we might note that even a more mainstream Kantian interpreter such as Allison actually gets close to this idea (unintentionally, no doubt) when illustrating the notion of the schema’s ability to provide the mediating conditions of a ‘subsuming’ of categories under rules through his use of the example of chess. Allison writes that a limited number of rules define a ‘legal’ chess move, but if one tries to describe the rules of a ‘good,’ position-improving chess move, because of all the contingent circumstances that might arise, there would potentially be an infinite number of such rules to be articulated. Thus, to recognize that a particular (good) move falls, or is subsumed, under a concept, is a matter for one’s judgment, involving imagination and interpretation. (Allison 2004: 205–8) That is, a certain ‘leap of faith’ must be risked, something that ultimately cannot be accounted for and is not guaranteed by any rules. Such an element is involved in the very notion of the schema as it guides our perception in this imaginative act and to account for it Allison must resort to personal judgment. Kant seems to sense this excessive element when he writes that the ‘schematism of our understanding with regard to appearance… is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty.’ [A141/B180–1] The excessive element, answerable to a ‘hidden art’ rather than mere rational discourse, is precisely the unaccountable gesture of spontaneous subjective activity which Žižek equates with the violent disruption of the pre-synthetic imagination. It is hidden from normal view in time-schematized experience and Žižek has been able to discern it thanks to his unique reading of the experience of the Kantian Sublime as temporally disruptive.
To understand this, consider Kant, famous words which conclude the second Critique: ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’ (Kant 1996: 269; 5: 161) We can see the Sublime as an experience in which the subject at first experiences only powerlessness and displeasure when faced with an awesome spectacle of nature. Next, this displeasure suddenly inverts as the subject realizes that his own rationality is perhaps even greater than this spectacle of nature, which generates the opposite affect. Or more accurately, within the subject, there is an experience of a ‘pleasure in displeasure,’ which is the very definition of Lacan’s jouissance. What is important here is that we can also view this experience as involving two distinct Sublimes. Both are generated by the regulative use of reason that directs the understanding toward an object that is not of our possible experience, to an object that the imagination cannot hope to properly schematize as unproblematic. The first Sublime is one in which the subject confronts an object that is outside of its possible experience such as the ‘universe as a whole.’ Here is expressed an inherent imbalance between its apprehension and its subsequent comprehension, the latter forever lagging behind the former. The object here is just too large to be experienced as unproblematic by the subject and hence it reveals the failure of imagination and its inherent violent nature of synthesis. The second is one in which the subject confronts another type of object outside its possible experience, such as God or the soul. Here, the Sublime expresses the external way in which the noumenal Beyond (of the moral Law) violently intrudes upon our smooth self-affecting imagination, again revealing a failure of imagination. (38) Žižek’s critical point here is that these two cases of the imagination’s violence are at the level of its synthetic activity, in its (failed) attempts to synthesize the subject’s experience of Sublime objects. They are two cases in which the imagination attempts (and fails) to cover over (synthesize) the a priori ‘pre-synthetic’ wound of pure imagination itself, the effort to cover over its very own effort to synthesize. Again, the (Hegelian tautological) logic here is that the primal wound is consubstantial with the very efforts to heal it.
While a discussion of sublime experiences takes us out of the first Critique, these two cases actually follow a method of reasoning found in Kant’s Antinomy arguments. The mathematical antinomies express the inherent failure of imagination’s efforts, while the dynamical antinomies posit the distinct order of the Beyond of the inaccessible noumenal realm, forever frustrating the imagination’s efforts to provide an adequate schema for it. (38) Acknowledging his theoretical debt to Joan Copjec,33 Žižek argues the dynamical is homologous to Lacan’s masculine ‘all,’ while the mathematical is similar to the feminine ‘not-all ’ which further has a logical priority over the dynamical. That is, the masculine, dynamic logic of the Sublime, which articulates a forever out-of-reach noumenal object, is already an attempt to resolve the inherent gap between apprehension and comprehension of the multitude. (38) This homology between Kant’s antinomies and Lacan’s sexuation gives us an important clue for understanding why Žižek views the two failures of the imagination in the two Sublimes as already covering over the pre-synthetic wound. Using an example from the work of Levi-Strauss, Žižek find that the feminine and masculine logics should be conceived as two mutually exclusive endeavors to cope with the traumatic antagonism of Lacan’s ‘there is no such thing as a sexual relation.’ (Žižek 2005: 264) Likewise with Kant: the two Sublime experiences illustrate two mutually exclusive ways (of failing) to deal with the ‘primordial repression’ of the pre-synthetic wound of pure imagination. Let us conclude our discussion with a closer look at the dynamical sublime, since Kant himself often seems to have (erroneously) placed the freedom of the subject in the noumenal domain.
As implied above, the mathematical sublime shows that there is ‘not enough time’ to accomplish a successful synthesis since the object (eg, universe as a whole) is too large. Comprehension lags behind apprehension and this gap sustains temporality as such. There is a ‘drainage’ of time and presumably for Žižek the dynamical logic intervenes here in an attempt to counteract this flow, through a ‘synthesis of retention.’ (43) Some time-object forever slips away and is conceived as having been thus posited in the un-synthesizable noumenal Beyond. However, once in awhile, in the experience of a dynamic Sublime, this temporality of freedom returns and is necessarily experienced as a rupture in the causal, phenomenal chain, as if it emerged from some external realm (which Kant presupposed must really exist, always just beyond our reach). Again, Žižek makes much use of the fact that Kant reasons that if we were to gain access to our selves in the noumenal sphere, we would lose our spontaneity and turn into lifeless puppets. He calls this Kant’s fundamental fantasy, in that it provides the subject with the phantasmic support without which he could not be a free agent. What Žižek does here is another of his familiar ‘Hegelian twists’ he often accomplishes with respect to Kant: he inverts what Kant presupposes to be an epistemological obstacle into a positive ontological condition. (59–60) So it is not that the imagination fails to adequately schematize the suprasensible Idea of ‘soul’ because we simply lack the adequate knowledge base to do so, but rather the very regulative Idea of soul is just a secondary endeavor to sustain the abyss of freedom of the subject. This is consistent with our results above when we examined the Third Paralogism of Personality. There, we saw how this regulative Idea operated as the ‘form’ or act of the representation of the self as a person, which transformed the ‘nothingness’ of the void of the subject into the appearance of ‘something’ identical over time. Likewise in the present context, the Idea of soul covers over the empty ‘content’ of soul, which is empty precisely insofar as it is the primordially repressed abyss of the ‘night of the world,’ Žižek’s pre-synthetic monstrosity of a spontaneity not yet bound by any Law, moral or otherwise. This is to be equated in psychoanalytic terms as Freud’s death drive. (50)
Žižek’s overall criticism of Heidegger here is two-fold. First, he neglected to analyze the Sublime and this leads to serious consequences. Despite correctly analyzing experiences of the noumenal as those which must necessarily occur within the finite horizon of the subject, he did not proceed further and subsequently denied any subversive potential to Kant’s ethical revolution. The moral Law for him is thought according to his model of imaginative synthesis as pure auto-affection, as being both spontaneous and receptive. This is illustrative of Heidegger’s paradoxical approach in general: Heidegger first reduces temporality and the moral Law to pure self-affection, then he proceeds to reject them because they remain within the constraints of subjectivity. (46)34 Second, inseparable from this approach is the peculiar fact that Heidegger’s theory does not account for any excess. As Žižek writes, generations of post-Cartesians are compelled to articulate a certain moment of ‘madness’ inherent to cogito, which they immediately try to domesticate. Heidegger is unique in that he does not even recognize this excessive force of negativity in the first place. (62) Thus, Heidegger is doubly handicapped when it comes to the possibility of conceiving transcendental imagination as the point of mysterious emergence of transcendental spontaneity. A proper critique of Heidegger cannot simply proceed by removing the secondary, domesticating effort to cover over the abyss of subjectivity, since this abyss is simply not recognized in the first place as proper to the notion of the human subject.
Žižek, however, concludes that the monstrosity of the Freudian death drive adequately accounts for the notion of the unimaginable spontaneity of human subjectivity. He proposes to read the unconscious drive, as that which is ‘outside time,’ against the background of Heidegger’s ‘temporality as the ontological horizon of the experience of Being.’ Since it is ‘outside time’, the drive is pre-ontological, a domain of the ‘night of the world’ in which the void of subjectivity is confronted by the specters of proto-real partial objects. (63) In this way, Žižek expresses Lacan’s matheme for the subject’s fundamental fantasy ($◊a) as that which has the status of a pre-temporal spatiality. This means the subject can never experience it directly, by definition. Even near-approaches to the core of such a phantasmic support of the subject would thereby threaten the very consistency of his existence and would be accompanied by an unbearable sense of anxiety. To drive the point home, Žižek contrasts Lacan’s notion of anxiety with Heidegger’s, arguing that the former takes precedence over the latter. Of course, when Heidegger’s engaged agent is suddenly made aware of the contingency of his immersion in his Life-World, this experience of being-toward-death is anxiety-provoking. However, Lacanian anxiety is much more severe, for it accompanies the Freudian (death) drive, which is to be conceived as that which precedes each and every ontological disclosure of Being. (65–6) Death drive is precisely the domain of the pre-synthetic imagination: a pure self-contraction, accounting for the very spontaneous founding gesture of subjectivity.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
