How can we be Hegelian today? This is the question that Slavoj Žižek asks, and answers, in his Less Than Nothing. The answer in short is: we cannot and should not be Hegelians today. What we should do is work through Hegel’s texts carefully, and apply the post-Hegelian concepts we have at our disposal in order to correct the mistakes that Hegel made, and to come up with better answers to philosophical questions than Hegel himself managed to come up with.

For Žižek, some of the most valuable post-Hegelian concepts we have for interpreting our modern predicament are the concepts of psychoanalysis. Hegel on his own was unable to think certain things: for example, he did not formulate an adequate notion of pure repetition or sexuality. It is only by reading Hegel in conjunction with psychoanalysis that we can tackle these concepts and other concepts essential to understanding modern subjectivity. As Žižek puts it, we need to ‘repeat’ Hegel, which means reading him again in a modern context, and using newer ideas to capture the spirit of Hegel, rather than slavishly following the letter of Hegel’s texts (504).

Although Žižek thinks we should not be Hegelian today, he also thinks that Hegel was onto something. As he sees it, Hegel made a crucial discovery, which was temporarily lost in post-Hegelian thought: the idea that there is a ‘crack’ at the heart of being, in other words that reality is something that is in itself incomplete, and our inability to tie everything together theoretically is not an epistemological failing, but a necessary ontological one (8). Furthermore, it is in these cracks in reality, where there is ‘less than nothing’, that we find the spark that allows the new to appear so that reality can continue. To put it another way: ‘reality has to be supplemented by fiction’, it is by creating fiction where there would otherwise be emptiness that we create new ways of living that make reality tolerable (4).

Reading Hegel through Lacan, Žižek draws on this fundamental Hegelian insight to better understand modern subjectivity as we experience it today. For example, he finds in Hegel the Lacanian notion of a big Other which, Žižek tells us, ‘vaguely’ corresponds to Hegel’s concept of ‘objective spirit’ (185). For Hegel it is not enough that the individual will knows itself subjectively: it must also recognise itself in something objective. This is why the individual needs the state: the state and its institutions might seem to be sources of authority that impose their will upon him or her, but for Hegel this alien-ness of the state is an illusion. Just as the authority of Lacan’s big Other functions because we collectively create the illusion that it exists, so it is our own collective work that brings about the state so that we can know ourselves in it.

Crucially, it is not the case for Žižek that the concept of the big Other is already there to be found in Hegel: instead, once we have the Lacanian concept of the big Other, we can recognise it in the concept of objective spirit and this gives an extra depth to our reading of Hegel. And by explicitly identifying the concept of the big Other with the concept of objective spirit, we also make more explicit Hegel’s fundamental insight: that being, in this case the being of the individual subject, is fundamentally cracked or divided, in this case divided from itself and requiring the big Other.

Lacan thus has a ‘retroactive’ effect on the way we read Hegel today. Žižek draws on T.S. Eliot to illustrate this point. Eliot said of the literary tradition that it does not simply lie in the past, but is forever present, so that when a truly new work of art appears, the whole of the tradition is changed, and we read the older works of art differently in the light of the new (208). A new work of art becomes a lens through which we can look back on the tradition to see it in a whole new way. Conversely, it is only when we bear in mind the way that a work of art is grounded in a living tradition that we really see what the new work of art is.

Similarly, if we fail to read Hegel through the lens of post-Hegelian thinking, we ignore the historical depth of both Hegelian and post-Hegelian ideas, because we fail to see how all these ideas respond to one another. Žižek’s discussion of the Deleuzian notions of ‘representation’ and ‘sign’ is useful for illustrating this point. When I see something merely as a representation, then I am taking it simply at face value, as the object in front of me. I am ignoring the historical depth the thing has, as something that is born of a tradition. If the thing is a great poem, say, I may enjoy it on the level of representation, but I miss something of its significance when I view it in this way. If on the other hand I see the poem for the sign that it is, then I will see it more for what it really is: as something that the poet had to create in order to respond to a problem posed by the literary tradition, and which has now reshaped the tradition that it relates to (215). Similarly for Hegel and those who came after him: they were responding to problems already posed in the philosophical tradition. Post-Hegelian thinking responds to Hegel, and we must look for the changes effected in Hegel by post-Hegelian thinking.

Hegel did not think that philosophy had no future after him. However, neither did he think that the future of philosophy, or indeed of anything else, could be predicted with any certainty. In addition to the ordinary chapters in Žižek’s book there are also 6 ‘interludes’, and in the first interlude Žižek asks: if Hegel is right and we can’t deduce what the future will be like, if the owl of Minerva really flies at dusk, then what? Žižek tells us that in French there are two words for ‘future’ that have slightly different meanings:

For Žižek, the Hegelian view is that we can look at our situation and tell from that where we will be if nothing changes, but we cannot predict the radical innovations that will alter this future for us. Hegel’s point was not that we can know nothing of the future, since he himself obviously had ideas about how things might turn out; Hegel’s point is that philosophy cannot predict what is truly new, and the philosopher must wait for radical changes to settle down before she can make her analysis, based on the new order that has emerged.

One thing that Hegel could not have foreseen was the form that modern subjectivity takes today, specifically the importance of the Freudian notion of the ‘drive’ for understanding modern subjectivity (6-7). Essential to the Freudian notion of the drive is the concept of the ‘death drive’. The death drive is the compulsion to repeat, and gets us ‘stuck’ on pure repetition (499-500). Hegel cannot think this compulsion to pure repetition, because for Hegel repetition can always be sublated and turned into something new. Hegelian dialectical necessity always ‘unsticks’ us, and so to put it crudely: since the death drive is the compulsion to repeat, it can never be a very big deal for Hegel, because we can always turn to dialectic to escape the trap of the death drive (500). And since the death drive certainly is a big deal for Freud, it seems that Hegel and psychoanalysis are incompatible.

Post-Hegelian philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze insist that we should ignore Hegel. This is because if we try to work through Hegel we will not be able to hang on to the notion of pure repetition that we need to understand the predicament we are really in. Žižek agrees with Deleuze to a point: we must ignore Hegel, but only after we have worked through him and learned all we can from him. Deleuze’s mistake is that in trying to ignore Hegel too early he never really gets past him (503-504).

The point of the book is to show that the Freudian concept of the drive is essential for understanding the modern subject, and that Hegelianism is essential to understanding the concept of the drive (546). As far as I can tell, Žižek wants to say that Hegel cannot think the drive, but that Hegelianism can nevertheless serve as a useful corrective to Lacan, who can think the drive.

Žižek hopes that bringing together Hegel and Lacan in the way that he has can form the basis for his political philosophy, which aims to reconcile reason and the drive. The problem with capitalism is that it ‘standardises’ enjoyment (970). Rather than leaving individuals to develop their own particular mode of jouissance, PR people tell us how to enjoy. Žižek thinks that a better order would be what he calls a ‘Communist’ one, in which the capitalist market has been replaced by a different sort of market, that doesn’t require enjoyment to be standardised (970).

Advertising is just one way that the individual’s drive can be manipulated. Reason can also do this. Importantly, reason and the drive are always tied up with each other, so that reason is never pure, but often serves the drive, so that we believe what we want to believe. For example, we see before us clearly the ecological disaster that is coming, and yet we do nothing. Partly this is because the problem is so big: we have too much data and so we are overwhelmed and unable to act (279-280). But partly it is because we are good at deceiving ourselves in the face of such danger: we can use our reason to rationalise and trick ourselves, putting our reason in the service of our drives by creating a useful illusion for ourselves (996-997).

Žižek concludes by suggesting that we need to learn to recognise the intersection between reason and the drive (1010). We don’t want anything — capitalist markets, ideology, or anything else — to decide for us how we should enjoy. So we should be just as wary of totalising political solutions to problems as we should of the advertising we see under capitalism or of the rationalising we see in the face of ecological disaster. The drive should not be subordinated to reason, and any real political solution must learn to recognise the role the individual drive plays even in the use of reason. This is at least what I took away from Žižek’s book: that working out the correct relationship between reason and the drive, or between Hegel and Lacan, could be a good step towards working out a political philosophy that might save us from future political disaster.

As I’ve suggested above, in Less Than Nothing Žižek is trying to show that we should use Hegel in order to better understand the drive, which we need to do in order to better understand modern subjectivity. I can’t decide whether he actually achieves this. On the one hand, he does show us how we can use the concept of the drive to make some very interesting observations about modern subjectivity. Furthermore, he does use Hegelian concepts to give an interesting reading of Lacan. However, I don’t think he ever really proves his point that Hegel cannot think modern subjectivity. For example, as far as I can see, Žižek never actually demonstrates that Hegel cannot think pure repetition. Instead, he more or less takes this as a given: we are told that Hegel’s ‘notion of repetition always involves sublation’ (455) and the rest of the argument seems to follow from this first premise. Perhaps this is fair enough, since it is such a familiar criticism of Hegel that Žižek perhaps thought his time would be better spent seeing what follows from this perceived failing in Hegel, than demonstrating that it is in fact a failing. But it does seem to me that since this book probably won’t persuade any committed Hegelians that they should not be Hegelian, or even that their Hegelianism needs a dose of Lacan to put it in touch with modern subjectivity, Žižek has failed to some extent to make his case. Similarly, I don’t think Žižek ever really proves another major point of his: that Hegel is a thinker of the ‘crack’ and the ‘less than nothing’. Instead, once again, he begins with this as a premise and seems to hope that the conclusions that result from this will be interesting enough to satisfy the reader.

Having said all this, perhaps proving one’s point is not everything, and this book is full enough of interesting perspectives on politics, philosophy and Hegel in particular to make the book worth reading.