Rethinking Zizek’s “The Parallax View”
As a result of my undergraduate thesis, I’ve immersed myself in Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique. I’d already read it once about a year ago due to its prominent position in Zizek’s last big work, The Parallax View (coincidentally, this was the first Zizek book I ever read, and then I almost perfectly worked backwards chronologically through his corpus, reading The Ticklish Subject, then Looking Awry, then The Sublime Object of Ideology, and currently finishing The Indivisible Remainder), but since then I’ve taken it up successively, even incessantly. I’ve read each section probably three times, as well as all the footnotes.
This isn’t to suggest that I’ve “mastered” Karatani—many sections are still troublingly opaque to me. But out of the intense focus on even minor details in Karatani’s work, it’s become increasingly clear to me just how much it structures The Parallax View. Here’s a quote from Karatani in the opening section on Marx:
Marx left a massive amount of work. But fragmentary as it is, it is impossible to induce Marx’s philosophy or political economy or communism out of the corpus. It was Engels who, after Marx’s death, first sought to make it into a system. He constructed an edifice of Marxism in conformity with the Hegelian system: dialectical materialism (vis-a-vis logic), natural dialectics (vis-a-vis the philosophy of nature), historical materialism (vis-a-vis the philosophy of history), political economy and state theory (vis-a-vis the philosophy of right), and so on. Since then, Marxism has striven to perfect this system, including theories of literature and art (qua aesthetics). Yet these projects have become increasingly far-fetched.1
The interesting thing about this is that, out of his transcritical reading, Karatani comes to reject, as is obvious from the quote, any “Hegelian” attachment made to Marx’s work, which includes dialectical materialism, historical materialism, Marxist theories of literature and art, as well as political economy, and natural dialectics. Thinking about this a little more… isn’t all this exactly what Zizek seeks to rehabilitate in The Parallax View? The introduction and first section are devoted to elaborating, via a confrontation with Lukács, a new theory of dialectical materialism. Later on, Zizek critiques historicism (unable to account for the performative dimension) in favor of a new notion of historical materialism (via Benjamin): the notion of History as that which is obliterated and completely re-narrativized after an Event—an Event through which all of History is re-thought.
There’s also a section on cognitive science via Catherine Malabou (a Hegelian philosopher who focuses in part on neuroscience): this isn’t simply an attempt at countering the claims of neuroscientists against psychoanalysis. It’s also an attempt to rehabilitate natural dialectics from the morass in which it had, since its very inception, fallen (the unscientific absurdity of Engel’s notion of the cosmos as a dialectical machine, for example…).
There are also other hints of Karatani’s influence: in order to reframe the notion of a priori synthetic judgment, Karatani “annexes” Kierkegaard as a Kantian thinker, deploying the notion of salto mortale as that which unites, with great fragility, the two split faculties of sensibility and understanding. Zizek then attempts to “reannex” Kierkegaard (through a very nuanced and well-supported analysis2), who more than any other post-Kantian philosopher seems to be the most synonymous with “anti-Hegelianism,” as a Hegelian/Lacanian par excellence! Even Zizek’s analysis of Henry James’s prose feels a bit different from his usual pop-culture analyses (a recurring theme since his first English work, The Sublime Object of Ideology): I’d propose that this is because his analysis (of James) is less in the vein of ideology critique (as in the case of his analysis of Hollywood cinema), or even his analyses of Claudel or Hamlet (authors who Lacan commented), than it is something new to The Parallax View: a concerted attempt at salvaging Marxian-Hegelian(-Lacanian) aesthetics.
It’s hard to say whether Karatani or Zizek come out on top. It’s something I haven’t been able to make up my mind on: like with parallax, it seems that all one can do in this encounter is emphasize the insurmountable difference between the two positions… the fact that they cannot be cheaply “synthesized” (as if such a notion were even Hegelian to begin with…). The point, though, is that there is much more of Karatani’s influence in The Parallax View than just the notion of “parallax,” which I think gets overemphasized (as does Zizek’s attempt at rehabilitating dialectical materialism, which is just one of the multitude of fields).