Žižek’s Negative Ontology

[Nilsi]

To understand Žižek, you have to abandon the idea that metaphysics is about finding some ultimate foundation - Being, Spirit, Substance, Consciousness, whatever. For Žižek, metaphysics is precisely what happens when that search fails, and keeps failing, and yet won’t stop happening.

His entire project - sprawling, obsessive, contradictory - is animated by what he calls a negative ontology, but not in some abstract scholastic sense. It’s more like an attitude toward existence itself: a recognition that every attempt to ground reality collapses into paradox, and that this collapse is not a bug, but the very structure of the Real.

Rather than escaping metaphysics, Žižek compulsively reads through it - looping through Hegel, Schelling, Lacan, Kant, Heidegger, and back again - not to systematize, but to perform the impossibility of closure. Every synthesis cracks. Every dialectical move exposes a remainder. Every concept ultimately reveals its own internal contradiction. And Žižek doesn’t fix this - he amplifies it, until the only thing left is the subject itself: split, failed, lacking, and yet irreducibly there.

This is the key: for Žižek, the subject is the name for what persists in the failure of Being to fully coincide with itself. It is the scar left by the impossibility of metaphysical resolution - not the foundation, but the gap where the foundation should be. His whole ontology is built on this paradox: that reality is structured by its own deadlock, and that truth only emerges when we confront this deadlock without flinching.

And here’s where Žižek becomes more than just a theorist: he performs this ontology. His style - frantic, recursive, excessive - is the symptom of the very system he describes. He speaks too much, because language can never say it all. He contradicts himself, because truth is never at peace with itself. His whole persona becomes a kind of tragicomic theatrical revelation: a philosopher as the living embodiment of metaphysical failure.

So if you’re looking for coherence, for synthesis, for a grand answer - Žižek won’t give you that. What he offers instead is far more disturbing, and far more honest: a glimpse into the structural absurdity of Being itself, and the broken subject who has no choice but to think it.

[Nilsi]

And this is precisely why Žižek can call Deleuze a genius - and yet ultimately abandon him. Because in Deleuze, the dialectical loop is surrendered. Thought no longer seeks resolution; it becomes pure production, affirmation, creation. Deleuze doesn’t search for answers - he dances in the infinite beauty of becoming. His thought is a celebration of what escapes structure, what slips through every system.

Žižek sees this. He admires it. But he refuses to follow. And in that refusal, he makes what I can only describe as a noble sacrifice: he gives his entire life to a project he already knows is hopeless - to a metaphysical structure defined by failure, lack, contradiction. He throws himself into it, again and again, not to escape, but to tease out ever deeper absurdities and paradoxes, to live the collapse, to perform it in every word, gesture, and contradiction.

That’s what makes Žižek a singular, monolithic figure in the history of philosophy. He doesn't offer escape. He becomes the performance of the deadlock itself. And it’s honestly a shame he’s not getting the credit he deserves for this - because what he’s doing isn’t just theory. It’s a kind of tragic heroism. A metaphysical martyrdom without transcendence.

Though me, personally - I’m ultimately with Deleuze. I want the beauty. I want the becoming. But I’ll never stop being in awe of Žižek, standing alone at the edge of the void, laughing into the deadlock.

Edited April 6 by Nilsi

[LordFall]

I haven't read Zizek too much I've just watched a few videos and @Lucasxp64 linked one yesterday

He has some interesting points but watching it I keep being reminded of why I dislike journalists and philosophers: they are just commentators and not leaders.

People like Zizek and Nietzsche don't really change the world, they just commentate on it. There's a reason why the ones in history usually don't do much and their work later inspires leaders/politicians that take inspiration from it and then do change the world.

They do make interesting intellectual contributions to the world of ideas but especially in this new world of AI execution is all that really matters.

We can endless mentally masturbate about ideas and thoughts all day but if we don't do anything about then it's precisely masturbation. 

[aurum]

That's sounds like a great description of Žižek.

But he's still wrong.

[Eskilon]

@Nilsi He is just bending over backwards to say the same thing.

Reality is a paradox and at the same time, it is not. You are, and you are not. This is the absolute. You have to find it, and at the same time, you have not. You can never fail, and you can fail to find.

Edited April 6 by Eskilon

[Leo Gura]

Zizek is a sick, lost, fragmented mind.

There is a resolution to metaphysics. It is God-Realization. Whole, Perfect, clear, radiant.

Metaphysics is not resolved at the level of concepts, it's resolved at the level of realizing Self. Self is not some tortured, perverted Zizekian mind. Self is the wholeness of God.

Zizek is literally missing himSelf. His sickness manifests outwardly in his ramblings and ticks.

Ontology is not negative, it is positive. God positively exists.

Edited April 7 by Leo Gura

[Lucasxp64]

It's so funny to see the philosopher's conclusions to be basically a mirror of their personal lives.

Like, Jordan Peterson is a good example. He is a guy with so much of that pent-up moralistic rage energy. And it translates so well with the ideas he is most enamorated about.

Gabor Maté is right about him.

Quote

SUMMARY:

Gabor Maté, a Canadian physician, offers his perspective on the rise of fellow Canadian Jordan Peterson, noting his initial impression of Peterson as bright and articulate. However, Maté expresses concerns about what he perceives as suppressed anger in Peterson and a tendency towards advocating repression, particularly in child-rearing. He contrasts Peterson's defence against mandated language with his alleged encouragement of emotional repression. Maté further critiques Peterson's focus on left-wing intellectuals and his selective condemnation of ideologies, questioning why Peterson highlights the atrocities of Marxist regimes while seemingly overlooking similar historical events associated with Christianity. Ultimately, Maté views Peterson as a complex figure who, despite some insightful points, largely functions as an advocate for repression.

 

[Nilsi]

On 7.4.2025 at 2:09 AM, Leo Gura said:

Zizek is a sick, lost, fragmented mind.

There is a resolution to metaphysics. It is God-Realization. Whole, Perfect, clear, radiant.

Metaphysics is not resolved at the level of concepts, it's resolved at the level of realizing Self. Self is not some tortured, perverted Zizekian mind. Self is the wholeness of God.

Zizek is literally missing himSelf. His sickness manifests outwardly in his ramblings and ticks.

Ontology is not negative, it is positive. God positively exists.

Yes, but you have to take these things in perspective. Žižek is, unavoidably, an academic - condemned to read and speak in that peculiar performance loop for the rest of his life. But instead of posturing as some solemn heir to German Idealism, or dissolving into pure post-structuralist drift, he does something else - something far more subversive, I’d argue. He takes the inability of language to grasp the absolute - the metaphysical crack he never stops talking about - not as a flaw to be fixed, but as the very motor of his thought. And then he performs this failure: obsessively, chaotically, with a kind of desperate comedic excess.

This, to me, is the philosophical pendant to something like free jazz or punk rock. I get why it might not be everyone’s thing, but I still think it’s a worthwhile and wholly original philosophical gesture - something that enriches the world in the same way someone like John Coltrane does. Again, if you’re not into that kind of thing, that’s fine - but it is a bit unsophisticated to measure everything against your own totalizing (even if logically straightforward) framework, if you ask me. It’s like judging Picasso through the lens of a Renaissance painter, or whatever. It just makes no sense.

[Nilsi]

On 7.4.2025 at 7:28 PM, Lucasxp64 said:

It's so funny to see the philosopher's conclusions to be basically a mirror of their personal lives.

“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

[LordFall]

On 4/7/2025 at 11:28 AM, Lucasxp64 said:

It's so funny to see the philosopher's conclusions to be basically a mirror of their personal lives.

Like, Jordan Peterson is a good example. He is a guy with so much of that pent-up moralistic rage energy. And it translates so well with the ideas he is most enamorated about.

Gabor Maté is right about him.

 

That's a great point, a lot of philosophy is projection. Jordan Peterson has a lot of key truths that resonated with me so I'll give him credit but he seems to clearly have some moralistic rage inducing demons in him for whatever reason. Isn't that what he struggled with before his mid 20s drugs and hedonism so he demonizes it? 

[Basman]

I haven't looked into zizek at all but the concept of a "negative ontology" seems like an oxymoron to me unless it is meant metaphorically. Ontology is the experience of something which implies that something IS happening categorically rather than the opposite, the absence of being/experience. Ontology has to be positive for it to be ontological unless I misunderstood something.

[Carl-Richard]

On 7.4.2025 at 7:28 PM, Lucasxp64 said:

It's so funny to see the philosopher's conclusions to be basically a mirror of their personal lives.

Like, Jordan Peterson is a good example. He is a guy with so much of that pent-up moralistic rage energy. And it translates so well with the ideas he is most enamorated about.

Gabor Maté is right about him.

 

And Gabor Maté is a histrionic crybaby who lets down all restraints and lashes out emotionally at people and then apologizes afterwards, expressing the addictive cycles of the breakup-makeup dynamic of abusive relationships. Just like the ideas he is enamored about.

 

Edited April 15 by Carl-Richard

[Leo Gura]

52 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

And Gabor Maté is a histrionic crybaby who lets down all restraints and lashes out emotionally at people and then apologizes afterwards, expressing the addictive cycles of the breakup-makeup dynamic of abusive relationships. Just like the ideas he is enamored about.

 

What are you smoking??

He handled that deluded Zionist masterfully.

Edited April 15 by Leo Gura

[Carl-Richard]

20 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

What are you smoking??

He handled that deluded Zionist masterfully.

I added another example to his idea that philosophers' conclusions are basically a mirror of their personal lives. When you believe in questioning repression and being open about one's emotions as Gabor Maté does, it's not surprising that he will sometimes let his emotions loose a little too much, which he recognized himself at the very end of the video.

Edited April 15 by Carl-Richard

[Leo Gura]

@Carl-Richard You should not attend my seminar then, where I will chase out Buddhists with a broom.

[Rafael Thundercat]

Even watching Zizek on youtube makes me check if I have any spit in my face.

[Husseinisdoingfine]

Gabor Maté is a saint and his books are excellent. 

His intellectual opposition to Zionist evil is just a blessing.

[integration journey]

I like Gabor Maté but his son is an Assad apologist which makes him an idiot.