"Freedom or System? Yes, Please!": How to Read Slavoj Zizek's Less Than Nothing—Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

Adrian Johnston

Already eagerly awaited years in advance of its eventual appearance, the hulking 2012 tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism is a (if not the) leading candidate to date among Slavoj Zizek's many books for the title of his magnum opus. Apart from introducing a range of new material within the still-unfolding Zizekian corpus, Less Than Nothing also consolidates in a single volume numerous lines of thought running throughout Zizek's various prior texts. In particular, this 2012 work involves Zizek presenting his most thorough and detailed account thus far both of his interpretation of the full sweep of Kantian and post–Kantian German idealism as well as of how his own theoretical project carries forward these idealists' legacies in the contexts of the early twenty-first century.

My goal in this intervention is relatively modest: to establish the preliminary basis for an immanent critical assessment of Less Than Nothing. Given that Zizek grounds this book and his larger philosophical pursuits first and foremost in the history of German idealism, revisiting this history is one of the mandatory preconditions for properly evaluating Zizek's 2012 masterpiece. After putting this historical frame in place in what immediately follows, I then go on to spend time philosophically reexamining Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel especially (including the complexities of the Kant-Hegel relationship) in light of how Zizek comprehends and appropriates their ideas and arguments. To be more specific, I herein interpret Zizek's philosophy as fundamentally a creative extension (one drawing on such post-Hegelian resources as Marxism and psychoanalysis) of certain precise features of the post-Fichtean "Spinozism of freedom" already envisioned by Friedrich Hölderlin, F. W. J. Schelling, and Hegel starting in the 1790s. Interpreting Zizek thus, my intervention here builds, via its historical and philosophical traversals of German idealism, toward a conclusion pinpointing the exact questions and problems Zizek's materialism must address if his overall theoretical position is to be judged to be cogent, persuasive, and satisfying. In short, these questions and problems set the immanent critical criteria for determining what a successful realization of the philosophical program of Less Than Nothing would have to accomplish.

An extremely brief period between the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries sees an incredible explosion of intense philosophical activity in the German-speaking world, perhaps rivaled solely by the birth of Western philosophy itself in ancient Greece (although Alain Badiou passionately maintains that postwar France is philosophically comparable to these other two momentously important times and places). Inaugurated by Kant and accompanied by the Romantics as cultural fellow travelers, the set of orientations that has come to be known by the label "German idealism"—this movement spans just a few decades—partly originates in the 1780s with the debates generated by F. H. Jacobi's challenges to modern secular rationality generally, as well as Kant's then-new critical transcendental idealism especially. One of the most provocative moves Jacobi makes is to confront his contemporaries with a stark forced choice between either "system" or "freedom" (to use language that Schelling, a German idealist giant, employs to designate this Jacobian dilemma and its many permutations and variants). In Jacobi's Pietist Protestant view, the systematization of the allegedly contradiction-ridden Kantian philosophy—the post-Kantian idealists at least agree with Jacobi that Kant indeed falls short of achieving thoroughly rigorous systematicity—inevitably must result, as with any rationally systematic philosophy on Jacobi's assessment, in the very loss of what arguably is most dear to this philosophy itself in its contemporaneity with both the Enlightenment and, later, the French Revolution: in a word, autonomy (in Kant's specific case, the transcendental subject's powers of spontaneous judgment and self-determination). Suffice it to say, Jacobi is far from satisfied with the attempted resolution of the third of the "antinomies of pure reason" in the Critique of Pure Reason. This dissatisfaction is supported by Jacobi's undermining of the Kantian noumenal-phenomenal distinction through his criticisms of the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich), criticisms subsequently broadened and deepened by the "big three" of post-Kantian German idealism: J. G. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

With the unintended effect of igniting a burning fascination with Baruch Spinoza among a younger generation of intellectuals, Jacobi, as part of his anti-Enlightenment agenda, contentiously claims that Spinoza's monistic substance metaphysics is the one and only system inevitably arrived at by all unflinchingly consistent and consequent philosophical reasoning. Construing this metaphysics as materialistic and naturalistic, Jacobi equates Spinozist ontology with freedom-denying, subject-squelching determinism (i.e., "fatalism") and therefore also with atheistic "nihilism." The "pantheism controversy" (Pantheismusstreit) triggered by Jacobi's polemicizing saddles Kant's idealist successors, insofar as they wish to systematize Kantian philosophy (with varying degrees of sympathy and fidelity), with the task of formulating a totally coherent metaphysics (qua a seamlessly integrated epistemology and ontology) nonetheless preserving space within itself for the spontaneity of self-determining...