Žižek’s Return to the Idealist Subject: Beckett, the Failed Absolute and the Poetry of Anxiety

Abstract

This paper introduces the distinctiveness of Slavoj Žižek's reading of literature by examining the import of his praise (proffered in the recently published Sex and the Failed Absolute) for Samuel Beckett as "the great writer of abstraction" and deployment of Friedrich Hölderlin as a counterexample. It begins by distinguishing what Žižek refers to as "idealism pushed to its limits"—that is, his retention of the idealist subject within a materialist project—from other contemporary idealisms and materialisms before turning to the question of how it informs his understanding of literature and other modes of literary criticism such as new historicism. Specific attention is paid to the apparently antimaterialist importance granted to the negative power of abstraction as opposedto a materialist analysis of the concrete and particular. To further elucidate the stakes of Žižek’s project, a comparison is drawn between Kant's transcendental "I" and the "transcendental poetry" or "literary absolute" of the German Romantics on one hand and Žižek's "failed Absolute" and what he has baptized "poetry (of anxiety)" on the other.