Ontological Catastrophe Quotes

“The object of psychoanalysis and by consequence the human subject are not antiphysical because images and words are an infinite Other to nature, an external alterity that arises ex-nihilo only to penetrate into its secret chamber like a vandal and deface its sacred inviolability. The incommensurability lies elsewhere: images and language cannot be the cause of the denaturalization of the human subject; there must be something in nature itself that immanently moves it toward denaturalization. In short, nature itself is antiphusis, self-sabotaging, self-lacerating.”
― Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Zizek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

“Only able to sustain itself from within the cracks of transcendental synthesis, a parallax ontology functions within the impossible in-between of spectral materialism and full-blown subjective idealism.”
― Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

“Neither the phenomenology of the body, postmodernism, or cognitive science can just dispel the “myth of subjectivity” because all three of them, in distinct ways, need it to account for the very subject matter they take as their own. If the phenomenology of the body is to understand the very field of the (self-)appearing of phenomena to consciousness as embodied, then it has to come to terms with the breakthrough of transcendental reflexivity as a form of pure self-positing that institutes a subject-object schism rendering the very body that we live in Other to ourselves: “the subject (Self) is [...] immaterial: its One-ness, its self-identity, is not reducible to its material support. I am precisely not my body: the Self can only arise against the background of the death of its substantial being, of what it 'objectively' is.” Postmodernism needs to presuppose the pure I as something over and above the contingent field of non-finite cultural difference that it sets up even to talk about the complex network of discourses irreducible to naturalistic influences. Lastly, cognitive science cannot discard the subject if it is to explain the very possibility of how a gap in (material) being could emerge so that there is the basic distance from self that is necessary for the phenomenalization of reality. If we are to understand the true nature of the human being, Žižek's contention is that we must reread transcendental philosophy through the psychoanalytical category of Todestrieb, for both seem to cover the same theoretical set of problems in an uncanny manner; this unholy marriage of German Idealism and psychoanalysis aims to reconfigure the contemporary intellectual scene by offering a comprehensive system that is able to respond to the intrinsic limitations of all three disciplines.”
― Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

“Žižek's argument here is twofold. Firstly, founding itself upon classical biology, contemporary cognitive science presupposes that every organism is a self-contained system in harmony with itself seeking homeostasis and self-preservation, which prevents it from coming to terms with the psychoanalytical concept of Todestrieb. Representing a malfunction in biology, whereby a person no more strives for pleasure and satisfaction, for the minimal possible level of distress and affliction, but rather for pain and even self-destruction, psychoanalysis identifies this apparently negative moment of short circuit within the biological machine with one of the defining traits of human subjectivity and thus of culture itself. Instead of being a mere haphazard disorder or a contingent feature of a sick mind, Todestrieb comes to represent a necessary feature of the singularity of our being: the condition of the possibility of psychopathological self-destruction is ultimately linked to our very freedom because the two are structurally homologous. Secondly, what Žižek adds to this argument for the supremacy of psychoanalysis over reductionist biology is the following insight: if there were nothing but the self-contained, deterministic system of the neuronal interface of the brain, then why is there (self-)experience at all? Why is there not just blind existence, a mere mechanism that auto-develops according to its own laws? Why does the nonconscious trembling of brute matter in its dynamic pulsations need to be aware of itself? Since the category of subjective experience is superfluous, unnecessary, to the materialism displayed by science, the mere fact of experience proclaims that neurobiological activity is not-all—that there is a gap, a series of interstices, which arise within its logical fold as a kind of unpredictable short circuit to which, perhaps, phenomenal reality arises as a response. Naming the place of this rupture the subject itself, Žižek's own work on cognitive science consequently tries to underline the inherent difficulty that the discipline has (for this very reason) to explain the emergence of consciousness, insofar as it points to a limit-situation within which the discourse itself breaks down.”
― Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

“But perhaps the greatest threat to subjectivity comes from contemporary cognitive science. In light of decades of groundbreaking research in neurobiology, there is a growing tendency to turn towards scientific models of explanation to explain away the uniqueness of human subjectivity. Researchers are not just constantly downplaying the role of systematic self-observation and autonomous discourses that deny the supremacy of experimental science; rather, what is increasingly coming into question is the infinite array of material offered by self-consciousness and the meaning of philosophical investigations into its culture and politics as structurally free from biological concerns. Instead of having recourse to first-person experience as it shows itself to us in the irreducibility of its complex dynamics as the site of personality (phenomenology), or the labyrinthine network of the symbolic universe of discourses informing our sense of self and other (postmodernism), they are able to explain the entire range of emotional and social characteristics through the nonconscious, asubjective pulsation of brute matter, the mere non-personal movement of neurochemico-electrical activity wherein the I becomes an epiphenomenal illusion created by a closed biological system of response mechanisms pre- determined by genetic code.”
― Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

“Here we see another advantage of the cogito that transcends its theoretico-explicative currency,
or more strongly, coincides with it: as the transcendental condition of the possibility of historical contingency, the pure I always stands above all fixed, particular sociopolitical constellations and thus presents the always possible basis of ideological critique and political revolution.”
― Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

“Given that Žižek in Less Than Nothing describes “the key question” of philosophy as that of “how thought is possible in a universe of matter,” so that we should focus our efforts on “the very rise of representation or appearing out of the flat stupidity of being” if we are to avoid “the very rise of representation or appearing out of the flat stupidity of being” if we are to avoid “a regression to a 'naive' ontology of spheres or levels,” the issue of whether this project is most radically accomplished by Schelling or Hegel is more than a matter of intra-textual consistency or
classico-philological accuracy, but touches the very heart of what Žižek takes to be the program of speculative philosophy.”
― Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Zizek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

“Freedom is not a raw, brute fact, but depends upon the caustic collapse of the vital fold of being, a brisure in the heart of the Real; the chaotic aggregate of ghastly forms that constitutes the zero-level of human freedom represents an ontological catastrophe, a catastrophe that is synonymous with the subject itself: “it designates [...] the primordial Big Bang, the violent self-contrast by means of which the balance and inner peace of the Void of which mystics speak are perturbed, thrown out of joint.”
― Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

“The key insight gained by contemporary physics is that material reality in itself does not present us with a dense field of fully constituted realities that form the ultimate building blocks of the universe, but rather with irreducibly indeterminate states lacking any substantial being and from which “hard” reality can only emerge if there is a collapse of the wave function. In this sense, the micro-universe of quantum particles is strangely “less” than that of the macro-universe that constructs itself from its vicissitudes, in a way that is remarkably similar to how the Kantian subject can only construct a unified, coherent world of appearances from the inconsistent fragments of sensation. In a strange logical short circuit, it would appear that not only is there no bottom-up causality at the level of experience (transcendental constitution is more real than what Kant calls “a rhapsody of perception”), but even the most fundamental level of the universe is metaphysically more chaotic than the ordered macro-level physical world that science classically described. It is as if all reality is transcendentally constitutive, so that the only way to break free of the correlationist circle is to push “this transcendental correlation into the Thing itself:” “[i]t is against this background that one can make out the contours of what can perhaps only be designated by the oxymoron 'transcendental materialism' (proposed by Adrian Johnston).”
― Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Zizek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

“Transcendental idealism is—or better, must be said to always already spectrally refer to—transcendental materialism, the difference between them being only that of a parallax shift: the two are negatively linked to one another by an impossible in-between, a disjunctive “and,” the very name of which is.. subject, so that an idealism must convert itself into a materialism and vice versa if subjectivity is to be fully explained.”
― Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Zizek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

“If the emergence of the Symbolic out of the Real—the passage from nature to culture enacted by the founding gesture of subjectivity—is the advent of a completely self-enclosed, selfsustaining structural system, then not only must its founding gesture withdraw from the scene in the very act of instituting the Symbolic, but further, even to explain this act we must posit the absolute as a fragile not-all wrought by negativity and antagonism. Or.. as a series of less than nothings whose essence constitutes an ontologically incomplete field.”
― Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Zizek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism