As we are approaching the times, where, according to some bright contemporary minds (Adrian Johnston, Catherine Malabou) to name a couple the debt of biology which according to Freud should explain psychoanalysis, is either being paid or close to it, the question of subjectivity: what is it, really, is re-surging with full force. Adrian Johnston bases his transcendental materialism on a presentation of this very problem and its solution in a couple of must-read books (1 2). There, he engages with modern thinkers on this issue (among other things).
Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism is a joint effort by Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek, where the issues are tackled from a slightly different angle. Unlike Johnston, for whom, in the crudest of terms, the rise of subjectivity occurs in the register of the Lacanian Real, Gabriel would question the very “real” status of this Real to begin with. In that sense, he is much closer to Žižek, who, in The Parallax View states that the radical materialism must start with the Hegelian concept of Notion (“a truly radical materialist approach … to put it in Hegelese, there is the Particular because the Universal is not fully itself; there is the opaque material reality because the Notion is not fully itself…” Parallax View, The Comedy of Incarnation). On a personal note: I find this anti-Leninist turn most gratifying.
A great feature of this book is Žižek’s chapter on Fichte. I am not going to try and do it justice in a blog entry. Suffice it to say, that importance of Fichte’s thought is only matched by the thoroughness of misunderstanding of it. Žižek boldly battles the dragons of Fichte’s perceived solipsism. It is not that he presents a “new” understanding of Fichte’s philosophy. He presents a “real” understanding of it, reminding us once again about the platonic difference between “philosophia” and “doxophilia”. The “doxa” in this case being the basic adoption of a false reduction of Fichte’s system by Mme de Stael to a story of baron Munchausen, who pulled himself across the river by his sleeve.
