Table of Contents
Introduction: Impossible Absolute Knowledge 1
Book I: Hegel with Lacan 7
1. “The Formal Aspect”: Reason versus Understanding 9
2. The Retroactive Performative, or How the Necessary Emerges from the Contingent 21
3. The Dialectic as Logic of the Signifier (1): The One of Self-Reference 35
4. The Dialectic as Logic of the Signifier (2): The Real of the “Triad” 54
5. Das Ungeschehenmachen: How is Lacan a Hegelian? 70
6. The “Cunning of Reason,” or the True Nature of the Hegelian Teleology 83
7. “The Suprasensible is the Phenomenon as Phenomenon,” or How Hegel Goes Beyond the Kantian Thing-in-Itself 97
8. Two Hegelian Witz, Which Help Us Understand Why Absolute Knowledge Is Divisive 105
Book II: Post-Hegelian Impasses 125
9. The Secret of the Commodity Form: Why is Marx the Inventor of the Symptom? 127
10. Ideology Between the Dream and the Phantasy: A First Attempt at Defining “Totalitarianism” 146
11. Divine Psychosis, Political Psychosis: A Second Attempt at Defining “Totalitarianism” 156
12. Between Two Deaths: Third, and Final, Attempt at Defining “Totalitarianism” 175
13. The Quilting Point of Ideology: Or Why Lacan is Not a “Poststructuralist” 195
14. Naming and Contingency: Hegel and
Analytic Philosophy 209
References 230
Index 236