Materialism between Critique and Speculation Available to Purchase

The intersection of German Idealism and psychoanalysis in Žižek’s philosophy seems to embody his ambiguous status: on the one hand the paradigm of philosophical system—Hegel; on the other the deconstruction of the system and the paradigm of anti-philosophy—Lacan. This essay critically questions these readings by focusing on the “epistemology of the case” in Žižek’s philosophy. It addresses the transformation of the notion of the system, implied by the epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis. Far from being a rejection of systematicity, the case is the system, which is grounded on the logical operations that Lacan determined as “non-all”. In addition, this chapter returns to some of the fundamental concepts of Lacanian epistemology—the non-all, the real, and the signifier—in order to reconsider their value for a reinvention of systematic thinking.