Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

Front matter

Ontological Catastrophe: Zizek and the

Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism

Joseph Carew

Contents

Acknowledgements 9

Introduction 11

10. 11. 12.

Chapter 1

Lévi-Strauss, “Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology,” in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 33.

See Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 86-94.

See Leupin, Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science and Religion (New York: Other Press, 2004), p. 27.

See chapters 4 and 5.

See Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre XVII: L'envers de la psychoanalyse, 1969—1970, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 36.

Chapter 2 Grasping the Vanishing Mediator Between the Real and the Ideal Žižek and the Unconscious Truth of German Idealism

Seeing a structural homology between the contemporary concerns of psychoanalysis and those of late German Idealism's response to Kant, Zizek turns to the latter to find the resources he needs to give an account of the ontogenesis of the psychoanalytical subject. However, to do so he not only has to go against mainstream interpretations of this tradition, but also has to do great damage to the founding texts themselves. Outlining the methodology behind Zizek's reactualization, what we will see is that the only reason Zizek can apply psychoanalytical tools to restructure its symbolic space and thereby develop his own philosophy is that this tradition itself is haunted by a spectral history of an encounter with an underlying trauma: namely, the subject as the vanishing mediator between the Real and the Ideal, which both Hegel and Schelling primordially reveal in their own manner, but ultimately recoil from and disavow. In this regard, German Idealism presents us with an unconscious Grundlogik that we can only now, with the aid of Freud and especially Lacan, reconstruct, thus giving us a profoundly new and controversial view of its internal development and theoretical preoccupations.

2.1 The Methodology of a Psychoanalytical Dialogue: Or, Lacan with Hegel and Hegel with Lacan

What is amazing about this psychoanalytical dialogue, however, is the heterodox readings of German Idealism and Lacanian psychoanalysis

it produces. To many critics, Zizek simply shows no concern for textual faithfulness or the history of ideas in his readings of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Lacan. His methodological approach appears, if anything, to function through a deliberate misunderstanding or liberal reconstruction that purposefully overlooks key conceptual distinctions that challenge his own philosophical outlook. Although there is some superficial truth in these critiques—one must admit that Žižek focuses on often marginal selections from texts and raises them to a level of logical priority that they do not have in the original —one of Zizek's rare comments on his own methodology is very helpful for dispelling confusion on how he proceeds:

Hegel didn't know what he was doing. You have to interpret him. Let me give you a metaphoric formula. You know

the term Deleuze uses for reading philosophers—anal interpretation, buggering them. Deleuze says that, in contrast to other interpreters, he anally penetrates the philosopher, because it's immaculate conception. You produce a monster. I'm trying to do what Deleuze forgot to do—to bugger Hegel, with Lacan [chuckles] so that you get monstrous Hegel, which is, for me, precisely the underlying radical dimension of subjectivity which then, I think, was missed by Heidegger. But again, the basic idea being this mutual reading, this mutual buggering [chuckles] of this focal point, radical negativity

and so on, of German Idealism with the very fundamental (Germans have this nice term, grundeswig^) insight of psychoanalysis.*°

Even if Zizek describes his own philosophy as an act of textual violence, almost of rape (it is also worth mentioning that the word “bugger” originates the old French bougre, meaning heretic, and acquires its colloquial sense from heresy being associated with deviate, outlawed sexual practices), this quote reveals a hidden methodological presupposition that guides all of Zizek's interpretative work. The comparison of his own philosophy to that of Deleuze is of crucial importance and is not to be downplayed. It demonstrates that, even if Zizek is intentionally going against surface textual movements in his reading, he does not understand his own philosophy as in any sense arbitrary, a deliberate misunderstanding of the philosophers with whom he is engaging, or even as exhibiting any disregard for the tradition. Zizek recognizes that he is not doing traditional history of philosophy or any kind of philologico-exegetical interpretation, but is, instead, attempting to do something that is productive of new concepts by revealing their disavowed insights. But this generative activity of concept-creation can bring forth something unexpected, unsettling, even traumatic—we may produce monsters.

Zizek is not directly interested in what the texts of the German Idealist tradition “have to say,” that is, their intended meaning, because this level of their discourse—like most discourses that fail to reflect upon the psychoanalytical conditions within which a discourse as such can take place—usually operates largely on the level of the Imaginary and its illusionary fantasy and can thus, perhaps even at most crucial junctures of conceptual argumentation, display a psychoanalytical superficiality. What therefore concerns him are hitherto unrealized textual potentialities, premonitions of which we can see in *marginal" comments or in various structures that often obstruct the general flow of a given philosophical system and consequently can be said to protrude out of its symbolic universe, negatively contorting it from the inside. Yet it is only by means of a thorough familiarity with this system and its surface affirmations that one can arrive at such unearthed possibilities and *reactualize" them. The analyst must, after all, Jisten to the analysand, even if, especially in its Lacanian mode, it often appears as if they are unconcerned or ignoring your needs and demands (for the goal of therapy is not the adaptation of the ego but rather a confrontation with unconscious, often traumatic truth). Zizek's own methodological approach to the history of philosophy, however, drastically differs from that of Deleuze insofar as it takes as its starting point the fundamental Lacanian claim that we can never say what we mean because there is an irremovable gap between the imaginary moi (“me” as the subject of self-conscious awareness who expresses the intention to say something, but somehow says something different and unintended) and

the symbolic je (the elusive I as the subject that one deduces from what has in fact been said). Not only is language something that exerts control over us more than we have power over it (as an ego, rather than existing as a speaking linguistic subject, we are in a strong sense spoken), but the surface content of our own words often belies a greater (consciously) disavowed (but unconsciously known) truth, a truth that is not “hidden” in some

deep, elusive place, but is so obvious that we often do not see it: *[t]he psychoanalyst is not an explorer of unknown continents or of grand depths, but a linguist: he learns to decode the writing that is already there, under his eyes, open to the look of everyone."?' In the slips and slides of discourse, in seemingly meaningless hints and gestures, we catch a glimpse of the Real as that which cannot be said directly in discourse but around which it eternally moves, acting as a black hole drawing in everything towards it, or what

Lacan refers to as its “cause” or “truth”:

Lacan's theory of interpretation is based, to some extent,

on a formulation similar to that of the caput mortuum: an analysand speaking in the analytic setting is often unable

to say, formulate, to come out with certain things; certain words, expressions, or thoughts are unavailable to him or

her at a particular moment and he or she is forced to keep circling around them, beating around the bush, as it were, never enunciating what he or she senses to be at issue. The analysand's discourse traces a contour around that which it hovers about, circles, and skirts. Those words or thoughts may become accessible to the analysand in time, in the course of analysis, but they may also be introduced by the analyst in the form of an interpretation. That is what Lacan means when he says that "interpretation hits the cause": it hits that around which the analysand is revolving without being able to “put it into words."?9

Keeping this in mind, we can easily see that Zizek's reading of German Idealism, by following its unconscious Grundlogik, is an attempt to psychoanalytically construct what the tradition in fact tries to say but cannot, by revealing what has been repressed in the first-level propositional affirmations of its texts. In other words, to borrow a Lacanian phrase, it tries to hit their cause. Although one can, of course, take issue with this methodology, one must admit that critics who take issue with Zizek's “selective” reading or “obvious misinterpretations" often just miss the point: they fail to see the underlying systematicity evident in his engagement with the tradition or understand why the conceptual moments he draws upon are so important.

In the spirit of Hegel and Schelling, who, in the uncertain aftermath of Kant, sought to articulate a philosophical system that could guarantee the latter's intuition of the irreducible autonomy of the subject,” Zizek like Lacan before him is convinced that there is something genuinely real and insurmountable in the experience of human freedom. Starting from psychoanalysis' insight into the constitutive disharmony between mind and body as a key to understanding its true essence, Zizek returns to German Idealism to see how the notion is conceptually refracted there. But in this respect Zizek's method is not a textual reconstruction of their arguments through an act of classico-philological retrieval nor is it an attempt to polish them up by using new resources at our disposal. What he notices is something primordially at odds with their surface content, which rather than rendering the texts of German Idealism logically inconsistent is more profoundly indicative of some kind of internal unconscious struggle, a struggle that is philosophically revealing and whose exploration—now made possible by the clinical tools of psychoanalysis—promises to unearth new ways of approaching its fundamental concepts. Finding premonitions of Todestrieb protruding out of the imaginary-symbolic space of its discourse, Zizek sees a disavowed truth lurking “beneath” the tradition's own attempts to think substance as subject by means of a dialectical interconnecting of mind and body, a disavowed truth that reduces the latter to a mere reaction formation, a defence from the true horror of subjectivity finally brought to the fore by Kant's account of transcendental freedom. After all, if German Idealism's breakthrough is the freedom of the subject, according to Zizek we must also recognize that “our experience of freedom is properly traumatic.”*° Consequently ZiZek gives us resources to think how, if we attentively follow the tradition's conceptual movements, we can see traces of an operative logic ephemerally emerging from time to time at crucial moments only to be covered up by preceding steps, so that our task is to reconstruct retroactively this hidden Grundlogik constantly interfering with what the tradition takes itself to be, if we are to come to terms with the disturbing metaphysics of freedom demanded by its founding intuitions. However, the methodology

of such a psychoanalytical reconstruction of philosophical trauma around which an entire tradition circulates as its unconscious cause or truth displays an important paradox that deserves to be highlighted, which we can elucidate by means of Zizek's discussion of the legend of Eppur si muove:

The legend has it that, in 1633, Galileo Galilei muttered, “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves”), after recanting before the Inquisition his theory that the Earth moves around the Sun[. ...] There is no contemporary evidence that he did in fact mutter this phrase, but today the phrase is used to indicate that although someone who possesses true knowledge is forced to renounce it, this does not stop it from being true. But what makes this phrase so interesting is that it can also be used in the exact opposite sense, to assert a “deeper” symbolic truth about something which is not true—like the “Eppur si muove” story itself, which may well be false as a historical fact about Galileo's life, but is true as a designation of Galileo's subjective position [... B]eyond the truth of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.”!

Likewise, the alternative history of German Idealism that I develop in the following in a strong sense did not happen as a historical fact. Little if any evidence points towards it, and often the philological references that I have gathered can be easily opposed by numerous counter-examples. However, this is not the point: although this account of German Idealism's failed encounter with its inner truth is in many ways nothing but a fiction, this does not prevent it from directly expressing the subjective position that each of its representatives holds (even if it falsely capitulates their conscious interpretation of what they are doing) in a manner that other philosophical methodologies cannot, for what concerns us are traces of the Real in imaginary-symbolic constructs and their logic. After all, “when truth is too traumatic to be confronted directly, it can only be accepted in the guise of a fiction."

2.2 A Metaphysics of the Real: An Hegelian or a Schellingian Project?

Central to Zizek's metaphysics of the Real as a psychoanalytical reactualization of German Idealism is his stark emphasis on the indispensable significance of Hegel. In various places, Zizek characterizes his own project as strictly Hegelian because, like Hegel, the enigma

that occupies him is the possibility of appearance itself: that is, how the realm of phenomenal reality could emerge from the self-actualization

of substance. Hegel is said to be the first to understand this question

in terms of inscribing the subject into the absolute: a subject that, in

the Kantian aftermath, is understood as intrinsically irreducible to the immanent ontological field that brought it forth, and that can freely mediate the latter for itself through its own idealizing activity. In this sense, Hegel's metaphysics could structurally supply the missing principle of a Lacanian metapsychology. Through Hegel, Zizek believes he can show that subjectivity is not illusory by situating idealism into the heart of materialism as an irruptive event, the claim being that premonitions of this can be seen throughout Hegel's philosophy. Apparently arguing by means of resources found in the latter for a self-splitting or of the noumenal within the dark pre-history of subjectivity, Žižek tries to show how the only consistent way to explain why there is experience is to posit an ontological catastrophe at the basis of the subject. Consequently, it would appear that Zizek makes the following his axiomatic first principle thanks to a direct confrontation with Hegel: Freedom is not a raw, brute fact, but an expression of the caustic collapse of material being, a brisure in the heart of Real, which is synonymous with the subject itself; “it designates [...] the primordial Big Bang, the violent self-contrast by means of which the balance and inner peace of the Void of which mystics speak are perturbed, thrown out of joint.””

But the overtly Hegelian nature of Zizek's project does not go without saying. In one essay, Zizek makes a claim that to many readers must appear out of place insofar as he gives it no qualification: “Hegel's 'overcoming' of Schelling is a case in itself: Schelling's reaction to Hegel's idealist dialectic was so strong and profound that more and more it is counted as the next (and concluding) step in the inner development of German

Idealism.”** What is more, this claim is repeated almost verbatim in Less

Than Nothing.” The effect of this comment is twofold: not only does it strike those immersed within *conventional," textbook accounts of the history of philosophy as essentially wrong (which, it must be said, are losing credibility as Fichte and Schelling research has finally gained an autonomy of its own), but it also highlights a fundamental difficulty at the core of ZiZek's reading of German Idealism and by consequence his own philosophy, insofar as his parallax ontology is perceived as a reactualization or continuation of this movement. This problem is only amplified when one engages with Zizek's major works on German Idealism. In both The Ticklish Subject and The Parallax View, for example, there are praises of Schelling as the greatest philosopher of the pre-symbolic Real, of the nature of the impossible X, the Je ne sais quoi, which precedes consciousness as the most central theme in post-Kantian philosophy and whose problematic uncannily reappears in the wake of the Lacanian subject. Zizek even goes as far as to say that Schelling was “the first to formulate this task”*° and the philosopher who “gave the most detailed account of this X in his notion of the Ground of Existence," which is why Ais philosophy and not that of Hegel is “at the origins of dialectical materialism."^* Given that Zizek in Less Than Nothing describes “the key question” of philosophy as that of “how thought is possible in a universe of matter,” so that we should focus our efforts on “the very rise of representation or appearing out of the flat stupidity of being" if we are to avoid *the very rise of representation or appearing out of the flat stupidity of being” if we are to avoid “a regression to a 'naive' ontology of spheres or levels,"? the issue of whether this project is most radically accomplished

by Schelling or Hegel is more than a matter of intra-textual consistency or classico-philological accuracy, but touches the very heart of what Zizek takes to be the program of speculative philosophy.

On account of this ambiguity, Zizek's own project of describing this process of the auto-disruption of the Real displays an undeniable oscillation between the characterization of this project as a Schellingian or a Hegelian one, even though he claims outright that Schelling is the culmination of this line of thought. Not only does it potentially suggest that Žižek tries to disavow too strong a relationship between a Lacanian-inspired metaphysics of the Real and Schelling, but it also shows that he might downplay the role that Schellingian notions play (or undermine possible roles that others could) in such a metaphysics, in terms of either our understanding of ontology (the universal), natural sciences (the particular), or politics (the singular), the trinity that constitutes the conceptual fold of The Parallax View, his first theoretical magnum opus. In other respects, however, it appears that Zizek may have recently changed or distanced himself from his earlier interpretation of Schelling, perhaps precisely for these reasons. Although Zizek, despite his constant insistence that his fundamental question is a “properly Hegelian one: how does appearance itself emerge from the interlay of the Real?,"?? oscillates in his early major theoretical works The Ticklish Subject and The Parallax View in his descriptions of who most adequately answers this question, in his new masterpiece Less Than Nothing this oscillation suddenly stops. While this project is again and again characterized as Hegelian,” the former glory once bestowed upon Schelling as the great thinker of the *phenomenalization of being” is not just downplayed, but apparently completely forgotten, with Zizek even going so far as to say that thinking the emergence of appearance is “what at his most radical Hegel does,”” thus contradicting himself.

However, despite appearances to the contrary, the ambiguity does not thereby disappear. Not only does Zizek claim that “[t]he minimal definition of materialism hinges of the admission of a gap between what Schelling called Existence and the Ground of Existence,” but the ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling relationship in fact gets radicalized in the middle of the second chapter on Hegel, when Zizek describes the latter's dialectic as “the science of the gap between the Old and the New,” and then without explanation jumps into a two-and-a-half page discussion of Schelling's theosophic odyssey of the emergence of “the cosmos (of fully constituted reality, ruled by Jogos) out of the proto-cosmic pre-ontological chaos.” Although to many readers this may appear as just another “typical” Zizekian digression with no inner logic, the argument that I develop in this book attempts to show that it is anything but that. Insofar as ZiZek himself claims that the only way to avoid mystification is not to abandon the project of the Weltalter but rather “to reformulate it so as to avoid the mystification of the theosophic mytho-poetic narrative,"^? it appears that the proximity of his reading of Hegel and Schelling, when coupled with this brief and rare methodological elaboration, points to the core of his heterodox reading of

German Idealism and thus to the core of his philosophy itself. Rather than being purely Hegelian or purely Schellingian, Zizek’s philosophy thus proves to be a hybrid of the two, an attempt—in some as yet unidentified way—to use Hegel to formalize Schelling's thinking, “saving” it from its theosophic commitments, and to use Schelling to radicalize Hegel, allowing him to draw out implicit but disavowed moves in his own philosophy and thus in German Idealism as a whole. But why does this ambiguity exist in the first place?

Immediately after his remarkable and provocative reading of Schelling in the first chapter of The Indivisible Remainder, Zizek goes on to argue for the supremacy of Hegelian dialectics over Schellingian metaphysics. For him, although there are premonitions of a radical breakthrough in works such as the Freiheitsschrift and the Weltalter," Schelling remains philosophically inferior to his great rival because Grund and existence ultimately remain distinct from one another only by being founded within absolute indifference, which itself “is not a product of opposites, nor are they contained in it implicite; rather it is a being of its own, separated from all oppositions, on which all oppositions are broken, which is nothing other than their very non-being, and which therefore has no predicate except predicatelessness."?? Indeed, Schelling claims that “from this neither-nor, or from this indifference, duality [...] immediately breaks forth, and without indifference, i.e., without an unground, there would be no twofoldness of the principles."5 For Zizek, however, this means that “the [Schellingian] Absolute is primarily the 'absolute indifference' providing the neutral medium for the coexistence of the polar opposites" of the Real and the Ideal and, as such, is at odds with the potential latent in his middle-late philosophy, a potential ZiZek sees in its articulation of the eruptive logic of Grund and its relationship to existence at the basis of subjectivity. In this regard, Hegel provides a superior logic in which there is no need for a principle of meditation exterior to Grund and existence as two reflective pairs that determine themselves through their internal dynamic, which in turn allows us to internally restructure Schelling's own descriptions of the interrelation of the two. In Hegel the very category of “and” changes—it becomes, in essence, tautological, thereby enabling us to identify Grund and existence instead of rendering them mere opposites or dual principles founded in something external to their own inner movement. In the logical process of the dialectic, the third term is already the second, understood as a negativity or internal limit inscribed in the first, insofar as it has merely taken over, usurped, the primary position from which the movement began by asserting itself as such. In terms of substance and subject, this means that “this very reversal is the very definition of subject: ‘subject' is the name

for the principle of Selfhood which subordinates to itself the substantial Whole whose particular moment it originally was."?! Nothing at the level of content changes: it expresses a purely formal change at the level of structure due to the tension generated by the contorting presence of negativity.

The dialectical movement that goes (i) immediacy — (ii) negation >

(iii) negation of negation is superior because there is no genuine return movement to the first, although it all takes place in a single, logically immanent field. The beginning and end do not overlap because something irreducibly different emerges within the first moment (negativity now being made foundational to identity), namely, to take the example that concerns us here, an “out of joint” spirit that has a degree of notional self-reflexivity in opposition to its ontogenetic ground, the whole within which it gave birth to itself. There is no need to posit a state of “originary health” of which

the devouring restlessness of the negative cannot be predicated (absolute indifference as that which stands in the difference between Grund and existence and thus is equally in one as in the other) in order to explain the dialectical movement of reality and its relation to the absolute.

As we shall see, Zizek's criticism of Schelling gets more complicated because it does not universally apply to the entirety of Schelling’s work, since for Zizek the latter is not characterized by an organic unity or continuity, but rather by a series of irreconcilable ruptures. He draws a distinction between a Schelling, of the period of quasi-Spinozism (the philosophy of indifference), a Schelling, of the radical ontology of freedom as seen in the second draft of the Weltalter and the Fretheitsschrift, and a Schelling, of the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which he qualifies—very violently—as a return to pre-modern essentialism. For Zizek, what distinguishes the middle-late period of Schelling's thinking is, strictly speaking, the articulation of an ontogenetic emergence of self-positing freedom in a manner remarkably similar to the Hegelian dialectical movement from abstract immediacy to notional self-reflexivity, which goes against the surface-level theosophic inclinations of the texts. It protrudes out of them and makes them non-coincidental with themselves in such a way that we can psychoanalytically reactualize their fundamental movement by “tarrying with the negative”—that is, by encountering the Real within them. What this means is that even if the self-operative logic of the Grund contains premonitions of a radical transcendental materialism, Schelling is at the same time the father of “New Age obscurantism.”® Expressing a reliance upon and indebtedness to Schelling would, in essence, open up a possible connection between Zizek’s own thinking and everything he denies—the non-Freudian unconscious (in its Bergsonian, Jungian, Deleuzian, and other forms), “pre-modern” cosmology, Romantic theories of nature, theosophy and even its pop-culture descendant, New Age spirituality.

In this sense, the very act of placing the logic of the Grund at the heart of the psychoanalytic subject appears to risk “destabilizing” the primacy of the Lacanian mode of the unconscious insofar as it opens up the possibility of interpreting it through a different account of one's relation to the pre-subjective life of the Real; covering up the pivotal importance of Schelling would seem to be nothing but a certain ideological act on Zizek's part. But here two remarks must be made. First, although it is perhaps a bit underhanded on Zizek's behalf to downplay the importance of Schelling for the development of his transcendental materialism, it must be added that this obfuscation is consistent with his overall interpretation of Schelling, for he rejects most of the latter's philosophy and needs recourse to Hegel even to reactualize the logic of the Grund that he sees as its breakthrough. But second, and more importantly, such an explanation does not solve the problem of the Hegel- Schelling relation insofar as this emphatic shift is simultaneously ambiguous, given the fact that Zizek does not distinguish which Schelling he is arguing against or justify How he is able to read the second draft of the Weltalter as an ephemeral breakthrough.

In this regard, by characterizing his own philosophy again and again as a Hegelian, but never a Schellingian project Zizek belies his overt reliance on texts such as Schelling's Freiheitsschrift and the Wéltalter for his project. What I propose, therefore, is to read Žižek against Žižek not only to demonstrate the implicit, complex intertwining of Schellingian ontology and Hegelian logic throughout his thinking, wherein I perceive the nuance of his theoretical philosophy, but also to show how by unravelling this ambiguity we can find new resources to explore the obscure origins of the psychoanalytical subject and the fundamental structures and essence of the world within which it emerges. Yet if embarking upon a reconstruction of the Hegel-Schelling relation within Zizek's work can achieve this, it is only because ZiZek sees his own work as an attempt to culminate the Grundlogik of German Idealism itself, which gestures towards the hypothesis that the intra-textual ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling relation within his thinking is perhaps less expressive of an internal inconsistency in his philosophy than of a fundamental problem inherent in the self-unfolding of that tradition itself 1n its endeavour to overcome radical idealism; so that, if by a dialectical reversal we turn an epistemological limit into a positive ontological condition, apparent textual confusion into a real feature of the movement itself in

its historical development, the ambiguity will prove itself in a second moment to be a side effect of a sustained methodological engagement with the fundamental insights of German Idealism which thus deserves to be investigated in its own right. As we will see, this ambiguity is in fact due to

a single traumatic kernel of truth that both Hegel and Schelling, attempting to ground the Kantian subject, bring to the fore in different ways, but ultimately have to repress or force into the unconscious, a fact that therefore requires us to use a mode of inquiry that goes beyond philologico-exegetical interpretation if we are to penetrate it:

The notion of Schelling's Grundoperation—the “vanishing mediator" between the two poles (the Real and the Ideal, B and A)—opens up the possibility of establishing a connection with Hegelian dialectics: the founding gesture “repressed” by the formal envelope of the “panlogicist” Hegel is the same as the gesture which is “repressed” by the formal envelope of the “obscurantist” Schelling, yet which simultaneously serves as its unacknowledged ground. [...] Does the gesture of “vanishing mediation” not point, therefore, towards what, following some German interpreters, one could call the Grundoperation des Deutschen Idealismus, the fundamental, elementary operation of

German Idealism?

It is our endeavour to articulate clearly the Grundoperation of German Idealism which necessitates reference to Lacan; that is to say, our premiss is that the “royal road” to this Grundoperation involves reading German Idealism through the prism of Lacanian psychoanalytical theory.9?