There is very little in this book which is about mythology, madness or laughter. It is, as the subtitle suggests, a book about subjectivity in German Idealism, and the title themes are discussed so little that it would have been just as appropriate to call the book Reflection, Habit and Anstoß (all of which are discussed at length). Still, before we report Gabriel and Žižek to Trading Standards, it's worth noting that the book does present a number of interesting arguments as part of an ambitious re-evaluation of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.

The book contains three essays (one by Gabriel and two by Žižek) and a co-written introduction which puts forward the overall position advanced by the book:

In other words, what Gabriel and Žižek are attempting to do is to defend the Post-Kantian Idealism of Hegel, Fichte and Schelling against a common but simplistic criticism often levelled at it: that the Idealists’ attempts to discuss noumena in non-negative terms was a misunderstanding of, or a regression from, what Kant was attempting to achieve in the first Critique. In short, that Hegel wanted to go back to doing the kind of metaphysics that Kant had just ruled out.

To defend German Idealism against this criticism is not an original project, but Gabriel and Žižek characterise it as being an important one, not least because it has the potential to give a new angle to the supposed ‘Continental/Analytic’ schism in contemporary philosophy. They regard the criticism above as being a result of this dividing line in the discipline, which has led thinkers in the analytic tradition to frame the shift from Kant to Post-Kantian Idealism in purely epistemological terms. On this basis, much of Hegel's work may very well appear nonsensical: at the very least (so the traditional undergraduate critique goes) it is impossible to provide empirical justification for many of Hegel's claims. At the same time, Gabriel and Žižek argue, many philosophers in the ‘Continental’ tradition have neglected features of Post-Kantian idealism which ‘do not appear to be translatable into contemporary philosophy.’ Gabriel and Žižek do not, unfortunately, say explicitly who they mean by ‘contemporary philosophy’, but comments about post-structuralism on the following pages could be a clue. There's also an oblique reference to ‘the fetishism of quantification’, which, if I'm picking up the vaguely Frankfurt-school-esque echo correctly, would need clarification if it were to be made part of any proper argument. This is, to an extent, representative of the major downfall of the book. There are many half-argued claims that sound important, but for which proper justification or demonstration is lacking in favour of word games, paradoxical noodling and – of course – occasional film references, which may help illuminate the points being made but fall a long way short of justifying them. Having said that, it does make for fun reading. And the goal is, after all, an ambitious one: to provide defensive readings of neglected aspects of Hegel, Schelling and Fichte which reveal the flaws on both sides of the philosophical divide.

Their defence in this book, then, is a thematic approach to an argument based on an ontological understanding of phenomena as being necessarily ‘within’ the noumenal world. For Gabriel and Žižek, the shift that German Idealism made was a shift from Kant's recognition that noumena could not be known and could therefore only be discussed in negative terms, to a recognition that this very gap between what could be known and what could not be known is in fact constitutive of reality. The claim that we cannot know anything of the content of noumena is merely an epistemological claim; but when this is transposed into an ontology, we must acknowledge that it is a necessary condition of the being of phenomena that both phenomena and noumena exist within a noumenal world, and the gap between them – i.e. illusion, error and the relative – becomes ‘the very texture of reality. In other words,’ they argue,

As a result of this, error, illusion and relativity must be asserted as constitutive of the being of reality. And it is through an exploration of themes related to this assertion in the work of Hegel, Schelling and Fichte that Gabriel and Žižek attempt to ‘make sense’ of this ontology.

Experienced readers of Žižek will recognise that reading Hegel in this way is by no means a new argument in Žižek's work. Most notably, a similar argument is given in The Sublime Object of Ideology, where ‘Hegelian’ jokes (amongst other such philosophical tools) are used to show ‘the way truth arises from misrecognition.’ (Zizek Reference Žižek1989: 64) There has clearly been an important shift, however. Žižek's claim back in Sublime Object was that truth ‘arises’ from error (a suggestion which goes back, at least explicitly, as far as Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, (Reference Nietzsche2003: 5) though Nietzsche does not put Hegel's name to it). The claim given in Mythology, Madness and Laughter is that error is not merely a dialectical progenitor of truth, but is in fact constitutive of it.

It is important, then, to consider exactly how Gabriel and Žižek go about articulating this claim. In the first chapter, ‘The Mythical Being of Reflection’, Markus Gabriel starts out by making a point about the apparent necessity of things existing within a certain domain. This briefly collapses into a slightly frustrating game with a paradox of set theory that will be unoriginal to anyone who is already familiar with set theory; but Gabriel's goal is to take this paradox – that a ‘domain of all domains’ both can and cannot be a domain; and use it as a tool to reveal the impossibility of any necessary totalizing reflection of ‘the world’. There is always, he argues, a ‘remainder’ to what logic and reflection can consider, which exists outside reflection but which reflection can never grasp. He draws this point out with a treatment of Schelling, who, it is claimed, goes beyond set theory, and any other theory of what can be reflected upon, by introducing the notion of ‘mythology’. ‘For Schelling,’ Gabriel writes, ‘reflection bears an indelible mythological remainder (Rest): it has a mythological origin it can never fully get rid of.’

The essay leads from this point, via some excursion around Hegel, Wittgenstein, Bataille and Cavell, to argue that since reflection can never fully grasp the necessity of necessity, that necessity is itself contingent. Gabriel considers this a more satisfying blurring of necessity and contingency than that attempted by Quentin Messailloux, who has recently argued for the necessity of contingency – that it is necessary that everything could be otherwise. To an extent there is a certain amount of wordplay standing in for argument here, but Gabriel often writes with great clarity, for example on his exposition of the claim that Kant depriving noumena of space and time was an ‘illegitimate act of transcendence’. In the final part of his essay too, where he applies his theory of truth to political philosophy and scientism, his argument is persuasive. However – and perhaps this is a question over style and publishing judgment that about the argument per se – he often tends to draw on references (for example his reference to the famous Bataille/Merleau-Ponty/Ayer argument about whether the sun existed before humans did) without fully drawing out why they are really important for his main thesis. To an extent, it's a good thing he doesn't – the essay is already the longest in the book by far. But one wonders whether it wouldn't have been better for Gabriel to have simply made a whole book out of this essay, despite the obvious benefits to publication and distribution that may have gained by sharing book with Žižek.

In contrast, the first of the two Žižek essays in the book is extremely short. Here Žižek attempts to resolve the Kantian antinomy surrounding freedom, which he does by application of Hegel's dialectical work on habit as being both unfree (in the sense that habitual acts are not chosen) and necessary for freedom (in the sense that my temporal freedom to form my own identity requires that I must take on, internalise, and eventually break my own habits). It's not easy to see at first how Žižek is advancing any thought more original here than could be found in Nietzsche or Sartre – and Žižek even uses Sartre's waiter to illustrate his claim. But in the context of the overall thesis of the book, the thought is developed: Žižek cunningly goes on to define habit as being a result of accidents, assumes the accidents and errors that cause habits to form as subjective, and then claims them to be universal and necessary (but also impossible). In doing this, Žižek attempts to break down the boundary between free, subjective habit-forming and objective reality, and reinforce the theme that subjectivity exists within objectivity. The essay's argument perhaps involves more linguistic sleight of hand than actual argument, but it is nevertheless entertaining to read.

In the final essay, ‘Fichte's Laughter’, Žižek attempts to defend aspects of Fichte's insights about the Ich from the later development of subjectivity in the history of Post-Kantian thought. He claims (and, again, this could be more fully argued) that the inability of the self to locate a ‘self’ as an object within itself is in fact constitutive of ‘self’. As a result of this, the self considers itself as passive, is required to replicate itself to itself, and recognises itself as both absolute and radically finite. It is this condition which ‘allows the subject to experience otherness.’ Interestingly, it is at exactly this point that Žižek seems to suddenly ‘remember himself’, and starts illustrating his point by piling up the kind of anecdotes and film references that had previously been conspicuous by their relative absence in a book with his name on the cover. This makes for fascinating reading in the final few pages of the book, in which Žižek presents Fichte's solution to solipsism as a derisive, sarcastic laughter at a simplistic division between reality and representation.

It may not be rare for philosophers to write books which campaign for a re-evaluation of the history of philosophy in order to change the way it is done in the future. It is rare, however, for such a high-profile writer as Žižek to do it so explicitly. Despite Žižek's fame and popularity, the book's style and terminology are certainly not intended for a general audience, but for academic philosophers. Perhaps this is why he has chosen to do it in a relatively low-profile publication (with a different publisher than usual, and co-written with Gabriel, who, despite the quality of his essay in this book, is a less well-known author). Such speculations are, to an extent, irrelevant to philosophy. The arguments contained in this book – although they could be fleshed out a little more – are not.