ZIZEK'S DISPARITIES: a meta-ontological reading

by Terence Blake

ABSTRACT
In this review essay I am reading Zizek’s DISPARITIES as he asks it to be read, against the
grain, following the guiding thread of the disparate in his text and drawing a simple line of
demarcation between the disparate and the monist elements. This is the same method that
Zizek is both advocating and illustrating in this book. DISPARITIES is an act of
“philosophical warfare”. It is written as a political intervention in the domain of theory, in
favour of a new or non-standard practice of philosophy.
Zizek agrees with Althusser’s thesis that philosophy is class struggle in the field of theory,
and specifies that here it is a question of a “struggle against the different forms of
obfuscating disparity”. He favours division and struggle rather than dialogue and consensus.
He wishes to draw a line of demarcation between the deployment of disparity ("ontological
difference"") and its obfuscation.
I argue that we can share Zizek’s concerns without necessarily adopting all of his
conclusions. Another way of formulating this struggle would be as the attempt to formulate
a view of the universe as open (and recall that Zizek has said that for the true materialist the
universe is open all the way down) without falling into postmodern relativism. We need
both disparity and realism.
From the perspective of meta-ontology Zizek's concept of disparity is a contribution to the
task of thinking the real with the right combination of plasticity and resistance, of
subjectivity and testability, of pluralism and realism.

(1) ZIZEK, CHINA MIÉVILLE AND THE ONTOLOGY OF THE KRAKEN

At first sight DISPARITIES looks like a disjointed disparate set of reading notes on a diverse group
of trending books from within the fields of Continental Philosophy and of Speculative Realism. To
that extent its title is apprpopriate, if only as mise en abyme of self-description.
However, we quickly realise that the disparity of the title constitutes both a new member and a self-
descripton, of the heterogeneous chain of master terms embodying the provisional unity underlying
Zizek's fundamental ontological project. Other master terms include negativity, parallax, quantum
incompleteness, dialectical materialism, or ontological difference. (NB: one could easily add to this
chain Bruno Latour's recent concept of "being-as-other").
Each of these terms is a temporary halting point, provisional quilting points for the work in progress
(or at least in process). Zizek cites, and tries to distinguish himself from, Althusser, Deleuze,
Derrida, and Adorno. Yet he is of the same ilk as them, and his attempted self-distinction fails.
Zizek's distinction from these fellow thinkers is tied to his interpretation of dialectics. It lies in his
refusal to read Hegel as a monistic philosopher of of totality, of unification and reconciliation. He
argues that in Hegel's thought there is no unifying substantial "mole" or cunning of reason, no
dialectical determinism, no puppet-master of history. For Hegel, as for Lacan, substance is barred,
subject is barred, negativity is primary, there is no Big Other. Against the hermeneutics of the
monistic mole, Zizek proposes a an intensive and disparate reading of Hegel as Kraken.
But Zizek himself is sometimes guilty of uniform perspectives and molish readings. In the case of
Deleuze this leads Zizek to dismiss the disparate concept of the "rhizome" for the sole reason that it
is derived from Jung. Zizek jokingly calls this atavistic Jung-phobia an example of his "Stalinist"
prejudices, where Stalin is one of the names of Zizek's mole.
Zizek's "criticism" of the notion of rhizome does not invalidate the concept at all, and applies
equally to his own position. Jung is Zizek's blindspot, just as he argues Hegel is for Deleuze.
In Zizek's mind "Jung" is the symbol of all that is homogeneous, harmonious and holistic, whereas
Deleuze, like many post-Jungians, uses Jung for his disparate pluralist potential. Zizek criticises
Deleuze for being influenced by Jung. He singles out the "rhizome" as a Jungian concept and
proceeds to replace it with the concept of the Kraken. Of course the Kraken is just as Jungian a
concept as the rhizome. But Zizek having at the outset ritually denounced Jungianism he can now
tranquilly go on to embody it unconsciously.
Continental Philosophy is full of knee-jerk anti-Jungianism, due to a lack of openness and
transparency, and of acknowledgement of disparateness, in its own intellectual history. It maintains
a deconstructive relation to Freud without realising that Jung was the first to deconstruct Freud
effectively.
(In fact, Lacan did an internship at the Burghölzli Clinic in August and September 1930 under the
directorship of Hans Maier, Jung's ex-assistant. I think that Lacan was more exposed to Jungian
ideas than he let on, preferring to foreground instead the influence of Surrealism, which pursued a
similar deconstruction of Freudism to Jung's.)
The first critique/deconstruction of Freudian ego psychology does not date from Lacan but from
Jung, but you would never guess this from Lacanian discussions of the failings of ego psychology.
Deleuze had more openness and more honesty, freely admitting to Jung's influence from the early
60s onwards. Zizek's denegation represents a regression.
Deleuze and Guattari have the rhizome, taken from Jung, but they also have the Thing, the Entity,
from the Lovecraftian/Melvillean model. The Kraken is a figuration of both, of their unity. For these
thinkers the rhizome is ambivalent between the mole and the kraken.
Zizek in DISPARITIES gives attention only to the authoritarian aspect of the rhizome, that of secret
manipulation and determination. He begins by arbitrarily equating the pluralist rhizome and the
monist mole as instances of covert determination. He then proposes his own solution, the Kraken,
which in fact is merely a repetition of the ignored uncanny Real aspect of the rhizome.
See also my discussion on Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek, Jung here.
The science fiction writer China Miéville, from his early novel KING RAT (describing the
becoming rat of its hero) to his recent novella THE LAST DAYS IN NEW PARIS, is far more
Deleuzian (and so Jungian) in his style of the "weird" than Lacanian. Miéville provides us with an
example of the disparate in the realm of science fiction and his weird ontology is both Zizekian and
Deleuzian. See: https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2016/08/18/weird-ontology-and-noetic-
estrangement-china-mievilles-the-last-days-of-new-paris/.
The conclusion of Zizek's Introduction to DISPARITIES is finally a methodological lesson that has
nothing to do with the superficial polemic against Deleuze, Jung, and Nietzsche that occupies the
foreground of Zizek's reiterated declarations of fidelity to Lacan and to Hegel. The main point is
one that all of these thinkers agree on: in order to specify, and to exemplify, the idea of disparity
Zizek must make use of a method and of procedures that are not given in advance but that emerge
out of the confrontation between disparate ideas:
"Method is not learned in advance: it emerges retroactively" (DISPARITIES, 5).
(2) DISPARITY AND SPECULATIVE REALISM

Contrary to the dismissive stereotypes about his work perpetrated by superficial critics and
commentators whose opinions have been formed without any engagement with his texts, Zizek is
indeed a philosopher albeit a non-standard one, and his thought and works constitute an important
contribution to the present wave of metaphysical creativity in Continental Philosophy. As such, it
fully belongs inside the contemporary constellation that includes the philosophies of Badiou, Serres,
Latour, Laruelle, and Stiegler.
I am using "metaphysical" not in the negative post-Heideggerian sense shared by these thinkers
themselves but in a quite different sense, that of Karl Popper's "metaphysical research
programmes". These are systems of thought proposing a general perspective on the world, which
contain both testable and untestable elements. Given the attempts in recent Continental philosophy
to make use of models and results drawn from particular scientific domains (mathematics, physics,
biology, linguistics, climatology) but without ceding to the ideology of scientism, this Popperian
sense is very useful and extremely illuminating.
Note: for an overview of this approach to Continental Philosophy as composed of a set of rival yet
partially overlapping metaphysical research programmes that are responding to a common problem
situation see this summary post. I propose six criteria for evaluating such research programmes:
pluralism, realism, diachrony, apophaticism, testability, and democracy.
I have been trying to demonstrate on this blog that all these thinkers can be examined as belonging
to the same constellation of thought and their contributions can be usefully discussed in terms of a
philosophical dialogue that exists whether they are familiar with or favourable to the other
contributions or not.
There is no need for the one-sided fantasmatic identification with the thought of one of these figures
and scathing condemnation of the rest. There is no need for war cries and anathemas: Zizek is great,
Laruelle is absurd! (or vice versa). Each of these thinkers can help us to avoid the traps of one-sided
formulations, impoverished examples, incomplete references and unthinking prejudices stemming
from our involvement with just one of the others.
This is one reason why Zizek's repeated attempts to draw a line of demarcation between his own
position and that of Deleuze are both superficially illuminating and ultimately unsatisfying. Despite
their evident differences, their metaphysical research programmes belong to a large extent to the
same problem situation and deploy similar concepts. We saw in the preceding post an example of
this phenomenon of foregrounding differences that exist within a shared background. In Zizek's
methodological introduction to he can only distinguish his guiding concept of the Kraken (a
monstrous power of disparity and of incommensurability evolving in the element of non-substantial
reason and of fluid processes) from Deleuze's similar conception by blatantly travestying Deleuze's
ideas.
In this review-essay I am reading Zizek's new book DISPARITIES as he asks it to be read, against
the grain, following the guiding thread of the "disparate" in his text and drawing a clear and simple
line between the pluralist (disparate) and the monist (equiparate) elements. This is the method that
he is both advocating and illustrating in this book.
As Zizek's introduction makes clear this "method" is not the application of a systematic whole of
pre-existent normative procedures but an inventive elaboration of an emergent non-totalisable set of
heuristics.
From the beginning Zizek applies this non-systematic heuristic perspective, arguing for a disparate
reading of Hegel's dialectics as against the typical reconciliatory reading that privileges synthesis
and totality. He opposes the heterogeneous un-determined Kraken to the uniform holistic
deterministic mole. He deploys the elements of disparity he finds in Thales, Kant, Hegel, Lacan,
Heidegger, Badiou and others to re-think his analysis of the contemporary field of thought.
In the first chapter of DISPARITIES Zizek discusses the microcosm of thinkers who either belong
to the movement of Speculative Realism or are thematically associated with it. In particular, he
considers the works of McKenzie Wark, Franco Berardi, Karen Barad, Ray Brassier, Timothy
Morton, Adrian Johnston. In each case he proceeds by locating in each thinker's work the
disparatous elements that he favours and setting them against the monistic elements responsible for
the forgetting of disparity that continues to block thought and to imprison it within the confines of
the Big Other.
Discussing Ray Brassier's NIHIL UNBOUND Zizek approves of the Sellarsian critique of direct
naturalization (the impossibility for a subject to ever fully objectivize itself) and rejects for this
reason Brassier's privileging of the causal principle of "determination in the last instance" over
transcendental "overdetermination".
This is an important point, which is not limited to Brassier's insufficiencies but which applies more
generally to the type of post-Althusserian thought to be found in François Laruelle's non-philosophy
and in the writings of his disciples. The privilege accorded to "determination in the last instance"
delimits a reductive, monist, causal objectivization of reason and subjectivity.
From Franco Berardi's HEROES Zizek retains the notion of the traumatic impact of the discovery
and of the deployment of neuro-plasticity as undermining our humanity and its habitual concept.
In McKenzie Wark's MOLECULAR RED Zizek approves of the Nietzschean notion of a
fundamentally unstable nature, of a rift in nature which splits humanity itself.
From Karen Barad Zizek takes the notion of the apparatus as constituting an inhuman mediation of
the inhuman to the human, enabling us not only to get to know the inhuman real but also to
construct new devices on inhuman bases.
From Timothy Morton, he takes the disparatous nature of hyperobjects as heralding the change in
our conceptual apparatus that is needed not only to comprehend but even to apprehend the
Anthropocene.
Finally Zizek considers Adrian Johnston's objections to his own privileging of quantum mechanics
as scientific exemplar of ontological incompleteness. This argument will be discussed in the next
section.

(3): ZIZEK'S QUANTUM HERMENEUTICS

It is a disappointing feature of much of the discussion in Continental Philosophy that it is

dominated by the vocal supporters of one or another master thinker. The Deleuzians mock Badiou
and condemn Zizek, the Zizekians dismiss Latour, the Laruellleans condescend to everyone else.
The audience is summoned to take sides in a battle for hegemony rather than to participate in an
open dialogue. Many choose to keep silent for fear of being held up to ridicule, patronised, or
simply ignored.
This refusal of dialogue is not only ethically reprehensible and inhumane, it is also an epistemic
vice that harms intellectual progress. My ambition on this blog is to restore dialogue, at least
between ideas, even if their proponents and defenders avoid exchange. Something is lost if we do
not envision alternatives, our ideas become emptied of sense, meaningless war cries or signs of
membership in the right club.
I read Zizek with Laruelle's non-philosophy in mind, even though neither discusses the other. I think
that each adds something to the understanding of the other. In particular, Laruelle's emphasis on the
far-reaching consequences of "quantum thought" allows us to see that Zizek's use of quantum
physics is not just one example amongst many other ones, but is of central importance. The
different interpretative options that each adopts allow us to see more clearly what is at stake in each
option and their possible coherence or conflict.
Zizek like Laruelle is a non-standard philosopher. Also like Laruelle he turns to quantum physics
for a model of non-standard thinking. However Zizek's use of quantum physics is very different
from Laruelle's in that Zizek privileges its disparatous pluralist aspects whereas Laruelle privileges
quantum uniformity, called by him "unilaterality". Laruelle's thought is one of ultimate
convergence, resumed under the name of "determination in the last instance". In contrast, Zizek's
thought favoursdisparity, divergence and "over-determination".
Zizek makes use of quantum physics as model but he acknowledges that Badiou's use of set theory
and category theory achieves similar goals. Laruelle is less pluralist about the choice of models. In
his book ANTI-BADIOU. He requires us to choose between quantum and set theory. This is in
accord with the uniqueness hypothesis, or rather the axiom of uniqueness that subtends Laruelle's
thought:
A1: there is only one non-philosophy, there is only one non-standard philosophy and Laruelle is its
thinker.
Zizek does not discuss Laruelle directly, but he outlines a critical analysis of the use that Ray
Brassier makes of Laruelle's key concept of "determination in the last instance". For Zizek the big
problem with Laruelle, Brassier, and their epigones is scientism and what he calls "direct
naturalization".
Zizek rejects naturalism as a project based on the "full naturalization" of Being and the "total
naturalization of humanity". He argues that this naturalist project is one of total de-subjectivation,
and that subject is based on denaturalization.
Another problem is that Laruelle's and Brassier's scientism leads to the uniformisation of thought
and to the denial of incommensurability and divergence in favour of uniformity and convergence.
A related point is the denial of ontological difference. In effect, Laruelle's non-philosophy falls
under the same aporia as Harman's object-oriented philosophy (OOP): it asserts the existence of
animpermeable apophatic veil but then, in contradiction with this, proceeds to specify what lies
behind the veil (Harman's real objects, Laruelle's One) and its mode of relation (Harman's
withdrawal, Laruelle's unilaterality).
Brassier's naturalization of Laruelle's One, like Levi Bryant's naturalization of Harman's objects, is
an attempt to resolve this aporia by simply dropping the apophatic aspect.
Perhaps behind the explicit alliance of Zizek and Badiou mentioned above there is an implicit
rivalry founded on a divergence of interpretative style. Zizek is to Niels Bohr (qualitative approach)
as Badiou is to Paul Dirac (formalist approach). Dirac contributed a useful formalism to quantum
mechanics, which was mathematically equivalent to the others. However, his underlying
philosophical interpretation of the formalism was not equivalent. Dirac was more deterministic
than Bohr and seems to have rejected Bohr's ontological interpretation of the uncertainty principle.
Laruelle leaves Dirac (formalism) behind but doesn't quite get to Bohr because his non-philosophy
leads him to subordinate complementarity to unilaterality. (For more discussion on Laruelle's
quantum thought see my paper:
https://www.academia.edu/9639078/LARUELLES_QUANTUM_HERMENEUTICS).
Zizek argues that the recourse to quantum physics is necessary to avoid presupposing a stratification
and hierarchisation of Nature, rising from the supposed completeness and presentiality of inanimate
nature to the incompleteness and absentiality of human nature. For Zizek such a theory of
emergence is a form of dualism and explains nothing.
Zizek lists four features that according to him characterise both the quantum universe and the
symbolic universe: the actuality of the possible, knowledge in the real, the delay of registration, and
retro-activity. The key feature for the discussion here is Zizek's use of the concept of non-causal
"retro-activity", which is in direct contradiction with Laruelle's idiosyncratic notion of unilaterality,
that he imports arbitrarily into his deployment of quantum thought.
Zizek also differs from Laruelle in that he he separates the notions of over-determination and
determination in the last instance. He assigns superposition/coherence to the side of over-
determination and disparity and collapse/de-coherence to that of determination in the last instance.
Paradoxically Zizek's use of quantum theory is a gesture of pluralism and anti-scientism. It
functions as a key part of his argument against the scientistic vision that theories of emergence tend
to reinforce, a vision of a unified science corresponding to the stratified hierarchised whole of a
unified nature. In contrast, Laruelle's use of quantum theory is both monistic and scientistic, and can
easily be recuperated by a monist naturalism.
Zizek's analysis shows us that science itself, in the form of quantum physics, furnishes us with some
of the best arguments against scientism.

(4) NON-STANDARD ONTOLOGY AND ITS STANDARD SHADOW

In the introduction and the first chapter to DISPARITIES Zizek has emphasised that his work is not
only to be understood in terms of ideological critique but also as ontological critique. He is not just
a media critic or a theorist in the field of cultural studies but first and foremost a philosopher who
is proposing a new, non-standard ontology.
This ontological project leads Zizek to give a critical account of the differences between his own
ontology and the seemingly similar positions defended by object-oriented ontology (OOO). It
emerges from Zizek's critique of the work of Levi Bryant, who has elaborated a naturalistic version
of OOO, that OOO represents a pre-modern regression within standard Kantianised philosophy
rather than a significant advance beyond it.
Zizek’s critique of OOO has many points of convergence with my own analysis of OOO and with
my critique of Levi Bryant's naturalistic version (see also:
https://www.academia.edu/2637439/AGAINST_METAPHYSICAL_NATURALISM).
The overarching idea is that far from breaking away from standard ontology, developped under the
sway of what OOO calls "correlationism", OOO constitutes merely a further step within the Kantian
paradigm, merely universalising the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon, internalising
it within each object. One may object here: this distinction itself remains transcendental, it is not
naturalised, it is not treated as itself an empirical hypothesis but as a necessary posit. More
generally, OOO’s basic propositions are purely subjective posits, and its “method” is none other
than subjective intuition.
Zizek traces a double movement, firstly one of naturalisation under the aegis of science,
accompanied by secondly, and more superficially, a movement of re-enchantment. This is OOO's
way of avoiding the nihilistic consequences of Ray Brassier's position. The ascetic worldview of
naturalism, which reduces subject back to substance, is supplemented with the euphoric vocabulary
of a pre-modern vocabulary expressing the interiority of things, a description of their "inner life".
In appearance OOO seems to operate a necessary de-centering away from the primacy of human
subjectivity and a re-centering on an objective field of objects and their relations. However, the real
contribution of OOO to modern naturalism is as a secondary ontological discourse that enacts the
triumph of human subjectivity.
Thus the overt conceptual aim of OOO, to critique the purported correlationist primacy of subject
over object within recent philosophy, is a mask for a covert ideological operation: to provide an
ideology that combines elements of a progressive account of modern science with a regressive pre-
modern ontology.
OOO proposes a strong critique of the primacy of epistemology and effects its replacement by pre-
modern ontology. Zizek notes that OOO’s critique of epistemology is inadequate and that it is made
in the name of an ontology unable to break with standard metaphysics and its standard critique.
OOO’s vision of the Real is based on a mixture of pre-critical naiveté and Kantian limitation.
For Zizek, OOO’s biggest defect lies in its inability to see that the lacunae, limitations, distortions,
obstacles, and impossibilities of epistemology are themselves ontological features rather than
simple epistemic failures. In a slogan: Kantian loss is Hegelian gain.
Zizek's analysis concludes that far from constituting a non-standard alternative to current
"correlationist" philosophies, OOO is standard dualistic philosophy proposing a simplistic de-
subjectivised ontology of the real as the in-itself of objects beyond our sensual reach, radically
inaccessible not only to us and to other objects, but also to themselves. For OOO objects self-
withdraw. Zizek argues that this concept of “self-withdrawal” is incoherent, as it implies the prior
existence of a Self as substance.
According to Zizek, the distortions and antagonisms of our knowledge and worldviews (of the
Symbolic) are not, as OOO claims, located inside the sensual nor in the passage from the real to the
sensual, but within the real, as an “excess” of the real itself. The real object, the putative undistorted
absolute real underlying all we encounter sensually is an ad hoc posit, a fantasmatic projection.
OOO requires a triple transcendental constitution: first the real is posited as an objective (de-
subjectivised) field, second the transcendental meta-constitution of the elements of this field as
objects, third the transcendental specification of these objects as certain types of empirical
elements . Thus, Levi Bryant is free to specify these real objects as empirical objects available to
scientific study, but also as processes, differences, units, or machines, according to the needs of the
conjuncture.
Note: Harman’s OOP short circuits this type of specification: in his version of OOO real objects are
re-specified as simply objects, conflating the meta-level placemarkers with their specific
instantiations.
There is no place for the subject in OOO. Zizek is right to note the similarity on the question of
OOO’s vision with Althusser’s conception of the subject as misrecognition. The parallel that Zizek
draws between OOO's and Althusser’s philosophy of the subject can arguably be extended to seeing
OOO’s distinction between the real object and the sensual object as a variant of Althusser’s
distinction between the real object and the theoretical object. OOO is perhaps the perfect ideology
for our times, amounting to a neo-liberal structuralism, a sort of de-Marxised and de-scientised
Althusserianism.
In conclusion, despite its non-standard ambitions OOO remains completely within the confines of
standard philosophy, with its self-confirming transcendental positing of an objective field of self-
withdrawing substantial objects. Having no method and no viable concept of the subject, it bases
itself on the purely subjective grounding of arbitrary posits and idiosyncratic intuitions. Unable to
escape the nihilistic consequences of the complete obectivisation of Nature it overlays its scientistic
naturalism (or in the case of Harman's OOP its idealism) with an ideological vocabulary of re-
enchantment.

(5) OOO AND THE TORTURE HOUSE OF LANGUAGE

According to Zizek OOO has an irremediably incoherent view of language as containing two
contradictory poles. Language is firstly a purely sensual construct comprising intrinsic perversions,
antagonisms, and distortions – but also miraculously contains a referential pole or function.
Note: distortion and reference are combined in Harman’s doctrine of allusion.
For Zizek language is not a mirror, not even a deforming mirror, nor is it a prison house from which
we may try to escape, but a torture house that generates in us the idea of a place to escape to and the
desire to escape only to frustrate it. Language is essentially traumatic and its inability to refer
beyond our constituted realities to a Real outside language is not a matter of Kantial withdrawal but
of Lacanian trauma.
I think that Zizek has located an important weak point in OOO, namely its philosophy of language.
How can we say anything meaningful about that which withdraws behind an apophatic veil?
However Zizek's own solution is left vague and undevelopped.
Bryant presents this essential reference to a non-human Real outside language as a key feature of
his onticology and criticises Lacan's entrapment in the Symbolic. To escape this entrapment he
relies on the supplementation of Lacanian psychoanalysis with scientistic naturalism, creating a
strange hybrid that cannot account for its own ability to refer to the non-linguistic real except by the
imperious insistence that it must be so.
Zizek has highlighted a problem here, but his solution is unsatisfying. However, his thesis that there
is no undistorted language brings him in agreement with Harman's doctrine of allusion as against
Levi Bryant's scientism. In effect, Bryant's scientistic naturalization of OOO amounts to positing
that science provides us with an escape from correlationism by means of an undistorted language of
the real.
For Zizek there is no undistorted language (Bryant's scientism) nor is there an undistorted real
alluded to by distorted language (Harman's idealism). Zizek brings distortion into the real itself, as
constitutive. The real is in the failure of (undistorted) symbolization. Against the relativist notion of
the prison-house of language (each in their own linguistic prison) with its dualism of inside and
outside, Zizek proposes the notion of the torture house. The outside is inside the prison with us,
"torturing" our dualist stereotypes and linguistic.
This thesis of the torture-house of language is a means of escaping the idealist idea that we are
necessarily emprisoned in our incommensurable linguistic systems while avoiding the scientistic
idea of a unified Nature accessible to the undistorted language of a unified science. It is a mark of
Zizek's empiricism without scientism. Language is not all-powerful and Reality is not infinitely
plastic, reference can fail at any time within our systems of interpretation.

(6) THE FAILURE OF SUBSTANTIALIZATION

Zizek continues his exploration of the impasses of OOO by examining its passage from subject to
substance. His argument here is that far from escaping the problematic of the subject (which
Meillassoux draws from Althusser and re-names "correlationism") OOO reinforces the very dualism
that it purports to escape. The naturalisation of the object is accompanied by the substantialisation
of the subject, which in turn must be compensated by a more or less poetic re-subjectivation (or "re-
enchantment") of the real.
Zizek advocates a reprise of the contrary movement, from substance to subject, that is to say he
proposes to undercut OOO's secondary re-subjectivation of the object (regressive re-enchantment)
by means of a renewed concept of the subject as de-substantialized. This movement of de-
substantialization was accomplished, in Zizek's view by Lacan and by the Deleuze of LOGIC OF
SENSE.
Here Zizek's terminology and argument become murky indeed, but the main lines are clear. We
need a concept of pure appearance that is not the appearing of anything. This de-substantialization
of appearance corresponds to Lacan's semblance and to Deleuze's simulacrum. It is only with this
concept that we can conceive of the subject:
"subject is the self-appearing of nothing" (DISPARITIES, 43).

Zizek proposes this idea of self-appearing of nothing as a more satisfactory solution than OOO's
subject as based on the self-withdrawal of the object.
Zizek argues that this de-substantialisation of the subject is a way of avoiding the paradox of
transcendental constitution that pervades OOO. It does not accede to an objective vision of subject-
indepebdent objects but only to a transcendental vision of a substantialized real that is in denial of
its own subjective basis:
"the problem with subjectless objects is not that they are too objective, neglecting the
role of subject, but that what they describe as a subjectless world of objects is too
subjective, already within an unproblematized transcendental horizon" (DISPARITIES,
85).

(7) OOO AND "SPIRIT IS A BONE"

Zizek's argument with OOO concerns the difference between the speculative judgement and the
reductive judgement, and the impossibility of reductionism. He cites Hegel's statement "Spirit is a
bone" as an example of a judgement that at first sight seems to be a reduction of subject to
substance, but which is aimed at producing a speculative shock in the reader. This shock is the
opposite of the mind-numbing effect many of OOO's seeming self-evidences produce (what I called
its "stupidity"). Hegel's phrase is meant to awaken us from the familiarity of the notion of substance
and to question its coherence, so that it may no longer be taken for granted.
In Zizek's account the subject is the outcome of the failure of symbolization. This failure concerns
not just reference to the object but the object itself. The object can never be its own interpretation, it
can never completely be just an object.This is Zizek's way to avoid both "correlationism" and the
sort of meta-correlationism that he is arguing is instituted by OOO.
The discourse of OOO, like the discourse of science for Lacan, depends on the foreclusion of the
subject. Lacan says "foreclusion" and not subtraction, because the subject can never be fully
subtracted. "Subject", at least at this stage in the argument, is another name for the absence of a
foundational level. Zizek does not deny the truth of science, he explicitly recognises the biological
and neurological bases of consciousness, but he refuses to consider them as foundational. In his
terms they are substance, but not subject:
"It is here that we should bear in mind the difference between the Freudian Unconscious
and the ‘unconscious’ neurological brain processes: the latter do form the subject’s
natural ‘substance’, i.e. subject only exists insofar as it is sustained by its biological
substance; however, this substance is not subject" (DISPARITIES, 45).

(8) ZIZEK'S CRITIQUE OF ONTOLOGICAL REASON

For Zizek DISPARITIES is an act of "philosophical warfare". It is a political intervention in the

domain of philosophy, in favour of a "new practice of philosophy". Zizek agrees with Althusser's
thesis that philosophy is class struggle in the field of theory, and specifies that here it is a question
of a "struggle against the different forms of obfuscating disparity". He favours division and struggle
rather than dialogue and consensus. He wishes to draw a line of demarcation between the
deployment of disparity (or "ontological difference") and its obfuscation.
I think that we can share Zizek's concern without necessarily adopting all his conclusions. Another
way of formulating this struggle would be the attempt to formulate a view of the universe as open
(and recall that Zizek has said that for the true materialist the universe is open all the way down)
without falling into postmodern relativism. We need both disparity and realism.
The book has a triadic structure. It is composed of an introduction, three parts (each of which
contains three chapters) and a conclusion. The three parts repeat the classic triad of the True, the
Beautiful and the Good, in that order, or epistemology/ontology ("ontological difference in the age
of science"), aesthetics ("the role of ugliness and disgust in modern subjectivity"), and political
theology ("the ongoing theological-political mess").
Another way of seeing this structure would be to keep in mind Badiou's notion of the four truth
conditions (science, art, love and politics). Zizek has elaborated an ontology in his earlier works
(most notably in LESS THAN NOTHING and in ABSOLUTE RECOIL) which he uses in this book
to critique the various ideological sutures and obstacles in our approach to these four domains. Part1
concerns science, part 2 art, and part 3 both love and politics.
Up to now in my review I have considered the first two chapters in Part 1, which sums up what we
could call his critique of ontological reason:
"At the ontological level, disparity is at its most radical ontological difference, so the first part of
the book deals with the persistence of ontological difference in our capitalist-technological world
which is getting more and more one-dimensional" DISPARITIES, 4).
The enemies of disparity that Zizek deals with in this first part are the hegemony of scientism (the
"predominance of scientific reason") and the compensating reaction of object-oriented ontology and
its technique of ontological re-enchantment. In the third and last chapter of Part 1 Zizek examines a
second compensating reaction to scientism that attempts to regulate science by the imposition of
transcendental norms with the aim of intersubjective communication and consensus.
The next section will discuss this attempt to obfuscate disparity.

(9) THE PROBLEM OF ZIZEK'S REALISM

Recently, I have been trying to synthesise the conclusions of my six years of philosophical
blogging. One of the philosophies that I engaged with at the beginning was OOO. I wanted to
include it in my synthesis, but it is old stuff for me now, and it has not fared well. As a research
programme it is dead. As decoration it continues. I had finished with OOO long before Wolfendale’s
regressive scientistic vademecum came out. I was looking for some way to speak of this dead
paradigm of OOO when I came across Zizek’s critique. It provided me with the appropriate
occasion.
Anyone who has any doubts about Zizek’s thesis that OOO is a practice of re-enchantment should
consider the key role of aesthetics in OOO. As I have often pointed out OOO has in fact two
ontologies, an austere one of real objects and a hedonistic one of sensual objects. The fundamental
doctrine of OOO is one of dis-enchantment: real objects withdraw and are invisible, untouchable,
unknowable. This disenchanted world of withdrawn real objects is supplemented, re-enchanted and
aestheticised in the illusory world of sensual objects and their use to “allude” to the real.
At the beginning Harman’s OOO was an intellectually fragile idealist venture. It was then
supplemented with a scientistic version, which has come to replace it and finally to reject the
appellation OOO. Thus the scientistic critique of OOO has two phases. First Levi Bryant criticised
OOO seemingly from within, by naturalising and scientising it. Secondly Peter Wolfendale
radicalised Bryant’s arguments, proposing basically the same critiques only more explicitly and
from a point of view “outside” OOO. This had the effect of reinforcing the scientistic wing of OOO
and of giving them enough assurance to allow them to “come out” in their rejection of the original
idealist paradigm. Thus the scientistic naturalistic wing of speculative realism (Meillassoux,
Brassier, Bryant) and diverse fellow-travelers has emerged victorious over the idealists.
The advantage of Zizek’s intervention is to provide a non-scientistic critique of OOO. But Zizek’s
anti-scientism is combined with his own technique of re-enchantment. All Zizek’s dark talk of
Kraken, monsters, trauma, madness, zombies, apocalypses etc. constitutes an alternative way of re-
enchanting ontology. But is another way possible? One is entitled to wonder whether dark
enchantment (dialectics) and bleak disenchantment (scientism) are the only possibilities.
Some people see Zizek’s thesis that the real is the impasse of symbolisation as a form of linguistic
idealism, a crypto-relativism. But there is another way of reading it, if we pay attention to the word
“impasse”, as an empiricism. The real resists our approaches, it is not infinitely plastic. For the
linguistic idealist a totalising language always succeeds, it constructs reality in its own image, it
knows no impasse from inside, it is not testable or falsifiable in its own terms. For Zizek such a
totalising language will always fail, not only when judged from without, but even from within, in its
own terms. It will frequently, but unpredictably, be forced to change, its impasses will be constant
but productive.
Zizek’s “enchantment” argument fails, it does not distinguish his position from that of OOO, but his
“impasse” argument remains useful against Harman and relates him to the scientistic version of
OOO.
Zizek tells us that “objects are never wholly objects”, which fact grounds his vision of the subject in
terms of a certain plasticity of the object. But his “impasse” argument, his claim that the real is the
impasse of symbolization, could be phrased correspondingly: objects are never wholly not objects,
objects also resist symbolization. The first is an expression of ontological incompleteness and
pluralism, the second of epistemological incompleteness and empiricism or testability.
Zizek’s criterion of enchantment versus disenchantment fails because as we have seen as his own
work is characterised by a rhetoric of dark enchantment. This is part of the more general problem
raised by Zizek’s attempts to distinguish his views from his predecessors. This is difficult as one of
his procedures is to take ideas from Deleuze and Lyotard and to “find” them in Lacan or Hegel.
For example, Zizek’s appeal to the image of the Kraken at the beginning of DISPARITIES is a case
of failed re-enchantment. Zizek’s goal is to distinguish his view from the “mole”, a hidden
determinist law of history, and the rhizome, a pluralist dispersion of histories. The Kraken
symbolises the deep traumatic disparity of the ontologically incomplete and thus non-determinist
Real, or the dialectics, or capitalism.
Surprisingly, after introducing the image of Kraken at the start of the book as a figuration of the
concept of disparity Zizek makes no more mention of it until right at the end, where he refers to it
only once in passing as “the Kraken of dialectical thought”. Thus his effort to distinguish his
thought from Deleuzian or Lyotardian pluralism is ineffective even at the figurative level.
What remains is the concept of disparity as a contribution to the task of thinking the real with the
right combination of plasticity and resistance, of subjectivity and testability, of pluralism and
realism.

(10) ZIZEK'S QUANTUM GENESIS

In section five of Chapter 1 of DISPARITIES, "Biology or quantum physics?", Zizek takes on an

impossible task, that of justifying "the priority of quantum physics" (page 39) in the explanation of
emergent properties, in particular of the emergence of subjectivity in the human organism. Of
course, he fails. Any such primacy is forbidden by the principles of his basic research programme.
However, in the course of this failed mission Zizek gives a very interesting account of his entangled
engagement with quantum physics.
This section takes the form of Zizek's reply to Adrian Johnston's objections to the primacy of the
quantum model in the materialist account of the genesis of free subjects. (If I were Adrian Johnston
I would be seriously tempted to commit hara-kiri as Zizek's replies are most often infuriatingly
wrong-headed).
Johnston's theoretical strategy is pluralist and pragmatic, arguing that Zizek's reliance on quantum
physics is neither necessary nor feasible:
1) it is not necessary as other theoretical models that break with the naive materialist presupposition
of a fully constituted, complete, determinate and deterministic nature are available (he cites
"emergentism, neuroplasticity, and epigenetics") - this is his pluralist point.
2) it is not feasible, as the distance between the sub-microscopic quantum level and the macroscopic
level of human subjectivity is too great for the quantum model to have any real explanatory power.
The parallel between the quantum level and the human level is thus more formal than explanatory -
this is his pragmatic point.
In his reply, Zizek does not consider this second point. He responds to a more general version of the
first point, to the pluralist objection that the primacy he accords to the quantum model amounts to
an undue ontological privileging, collapsing the universal ontological level and a particular ontic
level, effacing the very ontological difference that he claims to defend.
Zizek's argument serves to complexify this dual vision of ontological difference. He argues that
between non-manifest Being and the various manifest realities or ontic domains there is a third
term, that of an ontologically incomplete "proto-reality", a de-substantialised "embodiment of
nothing". This is the level that is, according to Zizek, best described by quantum physics.
Quantum physics is necessary because the "triumphant triad of evolutionary biology, biogenetics,
and brain sciences" is not enough. It is not paradoxical enough to account for the emergence of
human subjectivity and of the paradoxes inherent in the symbolic order. He concludes that
"something stronger is needed" (48).
The quantum model provides this "something stronger", not because it is reductively more primary,
but because it is closer to human subjectivity. Zizek's argument is after all a pragmatic one. He
refuses what one could call Johnston's "argument from distance" as being too epistemological. On
pragmatic grounds Zizek can say quantum physics is closer than the biocognitivist triad to human
subjectivity, as it has an "uncanny resemblance to what we consider specifically human".

(11) QUANTUM DECONSTRUCTION AND FORMAL CAUSALITY

In the previous section I am basically reporting, but also reconstructing, Zizek's position. As I
report, Zizek does not reply explicitly to Johnston's feasibility objection, but on my reconstruction
there is an answer to be found in the text. Johnston argues that Zizek's use of quantum mechanics to
explain the emergence of free subjectivity starts at a level that is too far from the phenomenon that
it is trying to explain and would require a long series of "bridge" theories before getting to the level
of the human subject. It is thus more economical to begin with biology and brain science, which
occupy levels just adjacent to the human subject, and which equally premise an ontological
incompleteness of nature.
The feasibility objection depends on what I call "the argument from distance", which itself depends
on the stratification of levels of emergence (or of reduction, depending on which direction you take,
up or down the levels). This is what has been called the "layer cake" model of explanation and
reduction.
Zizek's idea is that on the layer cake model the quantum level is "distant" from the human level,
with many other intervening levels, but that from a formal view they are quite close. This means
that for him the layer cake model is not always the best or most useful way to envisage the relation
between different ontic domains.
The quantum model, for Zizek, deconstructs the stratification of levels:
here quantum physics enters: what makes it so ‘spooky’ is not its radical heterogeneity
with regard to our common sense, but rather its uncanny resemblance to what we
consider specifically human – here, effectively, one is tempted to say that quantum
physics ‘deconstructs’ the standard binary opposition of nature and culture
(DISPARITIES, 48-49).

Zizek gives primacy to the quantum model not because it is the most fundamental level following
the the descending line of reductions and of efficient causality, but because it is the most
"deconstructed" model, and thus formally closer to human subjectivity. The sort of causality that
Zizek is emphasising here is a formal causality, where the "highest" (or most distant) abstractions
are inscribed in the real itself. In other words, Zizek is arguing for a realist interpretation of
quantum concepts.
This formal analogy between quantum physics and subjectivity means that the formal causality is
operative not only at the "base" or sub-microscopic level but equally at every succeeding level. Real
emergence from one level to another, that cannot be explained by reduction to lower levels, is only
possible because of the ontological incompleteness that is best described by quantum mechanics (at
the present moment).
Zizek does not fetishise quantum mechanics the way Laruelle does. He remarks that the question of
which theory best describes the transition from the paradoxical incomplete "proto-reality" to
constituted manifest reality is an empirical question:
"Therein resides the strength of decoherence theory: it endeavours to articulate the purely immanent
way a quantum process engenders the mechanism of its ‘observation’ (registration). Does it
succeed? It is up to the science itself to provide an answer" DISPARITIES, 53).

12) APPENDIX AGAINST POST-MODERN PHILO-BABBLE: REPLY TO CRITICS

This text originally appeared as a series of posts on my blog AGENT SWARM. Some people have
expressed objections to my posts, against their style and utility, treating them as manifesting an
acute case of post-modern psycho-babble (my own, and Zizek's). Here is the outline of a reply:
"Psycho-babble"? No, definitely not. Maybe "philo-babble" would be an appropriate term.
My goal in this text was to write a review of Zizek's new book that would take his ideas seriously
both in themselves and in relation to a broader context of thinkers. In short, I was trying to explicate
Zizek's thought in order to show that it was not just pure "babble" as many of his detractors think,
nor that it is the amazing unprecedented theory of everything philosophical that many of his
admirers believe it to be.
Zizek's books can read as a conceptual mess, but I think that I have made some parts of it clearer,
even though the use of some jargon is necessary if I want to be faithful to the letter of his text. Of
course as I integrate his vocabulary into a larger context I transform its scope.
The first section in particular has also a polemical intent. I wanted to compare Zizek's philosophy to
that of François Laruelle, and to show that Zizek gives us a far better, more satisfying, and more
comprehensible account. If you want to see real hard-core philo-babble just take a look at Laruelle's
writings. Zizek's style is much clearer, and much more entertaining.
The thing that I am proudest of in this article is the relation I establish with Karl Popper, something
that noone has commented on. I think that Continental Philosophy as it is most often practiced is too
self-absorbed and jargon-laden, and so uninterested in and incapable of relating its ideas to a more
general discussion.
By using Popper's idea of metaphysical research programmes I was able to set up and deploy a set
of criteria for comparing rival schools of thought that habitually ignore each other and that actively
discourage (pretentiousness!) and obfuscate (jargon!) comparison, discussion, informed critique and
evaluation.
These meta-ontological criteria constitute an open list of considerations to help us get our bearings
in the rather obscure common problem-situation, made obscurer by the fact that its participants are
indifferent to or ignorant of the shared values and to the possible points of comparison
Laruelle and the Laruelleans are the most hostile to such open discussion, and they maintain a near
impenetrable wall of jargon based on Laruelle's idiosyncratic and obfuscatory definitions of terms.
To these disciples the idea that Laruelle's thought could usefully be considered a "metaphysical"
research programme comparable with that of Latour, or Zizek, or Stiegler is unthinkable, because
they define "metaphysics" in a way that suits their grandiose claims of being the only ones to get
outside metaphysics.
Here I was obliged to use Popper's jargon in order to let us see through Laruelle's jargon and to take
it down a peg. Sometimes you have to fight jargon with jargon. I would never try to give an account
that replaces the original and exempts you from reading it, but my claim is that if you are reading
these texts and you have difficulty understanding them, or if you find them problematic in ways that
are difficult to articulate, my posts and articles will help you out. I can't convince you to take the
ride, nor do I want to, but if you do decide to take it I can help make it smoother-going.
As to "post-modern", I plead guilty only on the noble acceptation of that term given by Lyotard:
incredulity towards meta-narratives of legitimation. This incredulity is an anti-dogmatic and anti-
authoritarian stance that must not be confused with the unfortunately more widespread acceptation
of postmodernism as relativism. There is no problem with meta-narratives, only with their dogmatic
or authoritarian uses as ultimate instances of legitimation.