View this link:

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2009/05/again-and-again-and-again-real-materialism.html

Jodi Dean has a new article in Issue 12.1 of Theory and Event, which nicely links together Žižek’s The Parallax View and In Defense of Lost Causes. Dean reads the former as a rehabilitation of “dialectical materialism” (although I think the scope is larger) and the latter as a rehabilitation of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” This I thought was a nice little passage explaining the relationship between Žižek’s notion of “parallax” and Hegelian concrete universality:

Žižek uses the parallax gap both to explore Hegelian concrete universality and to revise some key Lacanian categories. Concrete universality does not refer to a universal core or essence animating its particular forms of appearance. Rather, concrete universality persists in the unsurpassable gaps between these forms, in their noncoincidence and struggle. The Universal, then, “names the site of a Problem-Deadlock, of a burning Question, and the Particulars are attempted but failed Answers to this problem” (35). For example, the concept of the State names the problem of how to contain the antagonism that underlies and generates society. Particular states are particular solutions. Christianity likewise names a struggling universality, one formulated from the position of the excluded which thereby splits substantial identities.

If you’re privileged enough to be able to access it, Dean’s journal article can also be reached in PDF format at Project MUSE.