Slavoj Zizek has been a very influential and interesting figure to me in regards to philosophy. Oftentimes, I am attracted to his way of thinking, yet vehemently disagreeing with some of his conclusions. On the other hand, you can’t help but love the guy. If there is one other philosopher who gives me the same mix of emotions, it’s Hegel. So what could be better than putting them both together?
In 2020, we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Hegel. Zizek reflects on this with a question, “Is Hegel just a historical curiosity or does his thought still address us?” (p.1) He continues on by explaining the dominant ideas of previous years, whether that be Foucault, Derrida, or Marx. We come to his first remark about Hegel’s ideas shortly after. Zizek argues that Hegel’s “Absolute knowing” is not a claim of premonition or omnipotence but it “stands precisely for the realization of an unsurpassable limit.”(p.1) He supports this by quoting Hegel directly from his work “Philosophy of Right.”
In a subsection titled “A Hegelian approach” Zizek explains further where he’s coming from. He says “the triad that defines my philosophical stance is…Spinoza, Kant and Hegel.”(p.2) His reasoning is as follows. Spinoza is the pinnacle of “realist ontology”, Kant takes a “transcendental turn” and Hegel works with the phenomena without appealing to a pre-Kantian realism. In Zizek’s mind, all of these work together in one way or another. Zizek announces the premise of his book later on and his premise is a big one. He says that Hegel has provided us with the “ultimate stand for thinking” and what Hegel provided was an “outline of an inconsistent totality.”(p.11) Zizek, throughout this book, consistently applies the Hegelian approach to various philosophical topics.
He gets into some serious topics, such as the “digital police state.” (p.29) Here Zizek reasons with us about what we consider to be social freedom. After his discussion of surveillance capitalism and Fichte’s response to Hegel in general, he goes further to explain what he means by the “wired brain”. There is a helpful graph that shows many arrows pointing to the chronological and functional order of what Zizek is talking about. (p.44-47) If liberal democracy is replaced because of the aforementioned problems, what replaces it? This is a question that Zizek asks the reader. (p.49) In this chapter, Zizek talks about the benefits of Communism, along with what it is and isn’t. He sees communism as more than just a social vision or revolution but a complex and nuanced position.
In chapter 4, Zizek gets into some theology. Given that he deems Platonov’s version of Communism as Gnostic. (p.67) Here Zizek does get into some Gnostic ideas, such as humans becoming gods, though he doesn’t seem to mean that in the same sense that a Gnostic might have meant it in earlier times. Zizek makes a lot of connections to the Bible and Communism throughout this work as well, such as in chapter 5 when he uses the Fall as an analogy for the entire chapter.(p.90-95) Next, Zizek talks about the Unconscious and draws heavily from Freud’s conception of the Unconscious. He ties in this idea with various social issues and ties it together with this idea he has been bringing up throughout the book, Singularity.(p.107) He ends the book with a treatise on the digital apocalypse.
Throughout this book, Zizek does a good job making the philosophy involved fairly comprehensible. I still wouldn’t recommend this to someone who hasn’t read much philosophy. However, I found Zizek’s application of Hegel remarkably refreshing, yet I was not surprised, Zizek on Hegel has probably been my favorite thing besides Hegel on Hegel.