Zizek Verses Deleuze

Zizek verses Deleuze
Why is Deleuze’s Philosophy deeper than that of

Zizek? ––– Because Deleuze’s Philosophy of Wild
Being is definitely more Superficial
Kent Palmer Ph.D.

kent@palmer.name
http://kdp.me
714-633-9508
Copyright 2016 KD Palmer1
All Rights Reserved. Not for Distribution.
ZizekVSDeleuze_01_20170321kdp04a.docx; corrected 2017.03.21
was ZizekVSDeleuze_01_20160913kdp03a
Started 2016.09.10-13; Draft Version 04; Not edited
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5298-442.022
http://schematheory.net
http://nondual.net
Key Words: Zizek, Deleuze
Abstract: Exploring the relation between Zizek and Deleuze and finding Deleuze to
have a deeper philosophy that needs more attention. Deleuze’s depth is based on
his superficiality discussing as he does incorporeal events in Wild Being on surfaces
and thus going beyond the exposition of Hyper Being of Lacan and Derrida. Zizek
has a foothold in Wild Being which allows him to manipulate things in Hyper Being
but he does not produce a positive philosophy of Wild Being as Deleuze does. Zizek
and Badiou want to explore Ultra Being but try to sidestep Deleuze’s Philosophy of
Wild Being and thus there explorations of Ultra Being end up lacking depth and
genuineness of meaning. Ironically Zizek’s philosophy is not superficial enough to be
really deep.
In this paper we will explore the question why Deleuze is deeper than Zizek. Zizek2
and Badiou3 both wrote books against Deleuze after he died. Deleuze was never as
popular outside France as Derrida and Zizek is surpassing that record. Deleuze did
not try to forge a following outside of France. To all intents and purposes you would
1 http://independent.academia.edu/KentPalmer See also http://kentpalmer.name

2 Ž iž ek, Slavoj. Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016.
3 Badiou, Alain, and Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Minneapolis, Minn. [u.a.: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 2006.
1
think that Forgetting Deleuze4 as Zizek and Badiou wanted us to do would be the
appropriate thing to do as he has not as yet had as much impact as either Zizek and
Deleuze outside of Europe. But what we intend to do here is explain how in a way
Deleuze is the Achilles heel of Zizek and Badiou. But to understand that we must
take a step back and get our bearings on Continental Philosophy in general.
I take to be the central issue of Continental Philosophy Fundamental Ontology. So

that might have some bearing if you think something else is more important than
Fundamental Ontology in Continental Philosophy. Also I look at Fundamental
Ontology through a strange lens which is Russell’s Ramified Higher Logical Type
Theory5, and I interpret the history of Fundamental Ontology in France and
Germany as a marching up the stairway to nowhere of the meta-levels of Being6.
Now when we look at it from this perspective we realize that there are only five
meta-levels of Being which are Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild and Ultra. And we can see
that Heidegger defined Fundamental Ontology in Being and Time7 by reference to
Pure (present-at-hand) and Process Being (ready-to-hand) which he saw as equi-
primordial. Then, later Heidegger discovered a third kind of Being which is Being
(crossed out) and that made him worried that this might be an infinite regress and
so he rethought his Ontology from the ground up in Contributions to Philosophy:
From Ereignis8. But the cat was out of the bag because Merleau-Ponty working
independently rediscovered this third type of Being toward the end of
Phenomenology of Perception 9 as the expansion of being-in-the-world. Then
Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible10 went on to explicitly name it Hyper
Being and to define its dual which is Wild Being (as a contraction of being-in-the-
world). Perhaps under the influence of Lacan, Derrida also rediscovered Hyper
Being as Differance and made it his mission to fully explore this meta-level of Being.
Then Deleuze came along about the same time and decided to explore Wild Being
taking off from the definition of given in The Visible and the Invisible. Fortunately,
there is little overlap between Deleuze and Derrida as each stuck more or less to
their agendas each exploring one particular meta-level of Being, and thus we can get
a good idea of the difference between these two esoteric meta-levels of Being by
reading their respective works with very little crosstalk between them. Finally, with
the passing of both Derrida and Deleuze then a new generation of philosophers
came to the fore who were Zizek and Badiou which I understand as attempting to
explore based on Lacan the final meta-level of Being which is called Ultra Being.
4 As in Baudrillard, Jean, and Sylvè re Lotringer. Forget Foucault. Los Angeles, Calif: Semiotext(e), 2007.
5 Copi, Irving M. The Thoery Og Logical Types. London, 1971. Whitehead, Alfred N, and Bertrand Russell.
Principia Mathematica. Ann Arbor, Mich: University of Michigan Library, 2005.
6 https://www.academia.edu/13194091/Meta-levels_of_Being
7 Heidegger, Martin, John Macquarrie, and Edward S. Robinson. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie
& Edward Robinson. (reprinted.). Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.

8 Heidegger, Martin, Richard Rojcewicz, and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event). ,
2012.
9 Smith, Colin. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception. Taylor & Francis, 2002.
10 Low, Douglas B. Merleau-ponty's Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of the Visible and the Invisible.
Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Claude Lefort, and Alphonso Lingis.
The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Evanston [Illinois] : Northwestern University Press,
2000.
2
Ultra Being is more a singularity in existence than it is a bonified kind of Being, but it
is still very important as it is the source of the lower meta-levels of Being. So this
would appear pretty straight forward in as much as these philosophers more or less
are exploring different meta-levels of Being and each one goes higher than the last
and thus we are getting a robust image of the entire hierarchy of these meta-levels
of Being. However, the details are more complex than it might appear on the surface.
The rejection of Deleuze by Zizek and Badiou has had a strange effect on their
philosophies that are rooted mostly in Hyper Being which was the predominate kind
of Being that Lacan used to explain Psychoanalysis. Thus what they have done
themselves is more or less dismiss Deleuze and have thus skipped over his insights
into the nature of Wild Being. Because Wild Being is more advanced than Hyper
Being that means we could do a critique of their work from the point of Deleuze’s
philosophy, and although they are studying Ultra Being, by skipping Wild Being
their insights into Ultra Being are limited, because they do not see it as beyond Wild
Being. And this is why Deleuze’s Philosophy is deeper than that of Zizek (as well as
Badiou). Essentially Continental Philosophy seems to have run its course more or
less and Zizek and Badiou are probably its last hurrah. But because they are still
indulging in Hyper Being ways of thinking philosophically and have ignored Wild
Being for the most part then their exploration of Ultra Being is flawed and not as
profound as it could have been.
Skipping the level of Wild Being, and attempting to go directly from Hyper Being to
Ultra Being is a problem, but there is another problem that is also important. Zizek
and Badiou ignore Genetic Phenomenology11. Genetic Phenomenology starts with
Husserl and appears in some of his later books12, but is mostly taken up in his
courses13. Many of the key ideas of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida come
from the Genetic Phenomenology of Husserl. But even more surprising is the fact
that Deleuze goes back to Genetic Phenomenology as the basis of his thinking14. And
so there is a stream of thinking in terms of Genetic Phenomenology all through the
tradition of Continental Philosophy which is abandoned by Zizek and Badiou for
Lacanian psychoanalysis and this effects how deep their insights are because they
are ignoring this theme in Continental Philosophy. Deleuze not only explores Wild
Being but he carries on and transforms the tradition of Genetic Phenomenology
within the Continental Tradition. Zizek and Badiou miss this most interesting thread
11 Welton, Donn. Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana U.P,
2002. Derrida, Jacques, and Marian Hobson. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011. Marrati, Paola. Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger. Stanford,
Calif: Stanford University Press, 2005.
12 Husserl, Edmund, Ludwig Landgrebe, James S. Churchill, and Karl Ameriks. Experience and Judgment:
Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1997. To be read with
Husserl, Edmund. Formal and Transcendental Logic. The Hague: Nijhoff, 2010. Bachelard, Suzanne. A Study of
Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989. Harris, Errol E.
Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking: Logic and Reality. Albany, N.Y: State University of New York
Press, 1987.
13 Bernet, Rudolf. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic.
Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2001.

14 Hughes, Joe. Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation. London: Continuum, 2008.
3
and go off in a different direction using Lacan as their starting point. The lack of
understanding of Wild Being and Genetic Phenomenology renders Badiou’s
philosophy15 rather hollow and more a curiosity more than anything, a flirting with
mathematics as a basis of philosophy, and attempt to out analyze the Analytics it
appears using Mathematics as the basis for one-up-manship. But Zizek, on the other
hand, has a serious philosophy and is making a big contribution. But his work is still
hobbled by a seeming lackluster appreciation for the importance of Deleuze’s
contribution to our understanding of Wild Being in counter distinction to Hyper
Being in which Derrida and Lacan’s work is rooted.
Zizek’s major work is to reconcile Lacan with Hegel and Hegel with Lacan. The effort
is to give the charlatan Lacan some philosophical respectability. But even though he
was a charlatan and confidence man, in whom we entertain little confidence due to
his trickster and narcissistic characteristics, still he made some important
contributions which Zizek’s interpretation gives us some access to we might not
have otherwise due to this intentionally cryptic style. And Zizek’s interpretation of
media and literature and politics among other cultural subjects is extremely
entertaining. And with his later books he is trying to do some serious philosophy
and even taking aim at some of Badiou’s work rather than merely praising him and
appearing to adopt Badiou’s positions as his own. Of course, Zizek is probably aware
of how Badiou harassed Deleuze at ENS16 and wants to avoid that unpleasantness
from Badiou himself. But the point is that Zizek is a first rate philosopher, but there
is an Achilles heel in his philosophy which is lack of appreciation for Deleuze, and
how the work of Deleuze should affect his own work. It is not that Zizek does not
understand Deleuze, he does and has taken to actually explaining Deleuze’s
philosophy rather than attacking him in recent books. But it is rather that Zizek does
not appreciate completely how Deleuze might further his own project of pursuing
his problematic of Ideology based in his use of Wild Being to manipulate Hyper
Being. Zizek uses Wild Being to transform the Grammatologial equations of Derrida
but then does not go on to intergrate Wild Being more deeply into his
understanding. In this Zizek is acting like a sophist, who uses Wild Being to stand
above Hyper Being but does not register the importance of Wild Being or how he is
using it to get a vantage point on Hyper Being. Zizek should have attempted to
reconcile Lacan with Deleuze as well as Derrida and Hegel. Then we would have
gotten a much deeper philosophy from Zizek, and that would have been good. But
obviously geniuses like Zizek have their biases and limitations and do not actually
understand everything, even if they think they do, like Badiou. At least Zizek is not
as arrogant as Badiou. And unlike Badiou his philosophy is not hollow. It is in fact
substantive. But still it is missing something important because he has not taken the
proper measure of Deleuze in his appraisal of him.
15 Badiou, Alain, and Oliver Feltham. Being and Event. London [etc.: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of
Bloomsbury, 2015. Badiou, Alain, and Alberto Toscano. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event Ii. Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2014. Crockett, Clayton. Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event. New York :
Columbia University Press, 2013.
16 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/%C3%89cole_Normale_Sup%C3%A9rieure
4
Zizek is a good person at explaining things. And he gives access to Lacan and Hegel
that would not be possible otherwise. But unfortunately so far he has been
explaining more than he has been system building like Badiou has done.
Unfortunately, Badiou’s system is empty for the most part. And so we are left with
meager results so far in terms of Zizek’s own thought rather than his thinking
through others. The most significant book of Zizek is Parallax View17. Less Than
Nothing18 is a sequel in which he explains everything about the relation between
Lacan and Hegel which is much appreciated. But Zizek’s best book by far is Sublime
Object of Ideology19 with its sequel They Know Not What They Do20. Also very good
is his book on Schelling21 and Tarrying with the Negative22. Many of the other books
just repeat the same material in a different order with a few things added. The best
book on explaining Lacan via film and literature is Looking Awry23. But although it is
exciting to hear the explanations of the thoughts of others like quixotic Lacan that
make sense, if we want to explore a truly original mind it is best to return to
Difference and Repetition24 and Logic of Sense25 by Deleuze.
We have not really come to terms properly with those books and Zizek’s and
Badou’s criticisms do not do them justice. Interfacing the two strains of thought
Zizek and Deleuze is difficult. And that is because the point of departure is Lacan, at
the expense of Derrida and Deleuze. Lacan had some interesting ideas but he was
not a philosopher. Thus to justify Lacan Zizek needs to enlist Hegel’s help. And that
leads us into a morass which it took an over 1000 page book to resolve. Thank God
that it worked out and it is over. We can only hope that Zizek goes on to think some
original thoughts rather than merely explaining the incomprehensibility of others
like Lacan, even though that has been very valuable for me personally because he
explained two of the most difficult figures in the Continental Tradition in ways that
made them both more interesting. Of course, this entails doing violence to both
Lacan and Hegel. But it is a very productive pairing. The question is whether it
actually leads anywhere. But contrast that work with Badiou who produced
significant theories in his own right in the two volumes of Being and Event. These
books are wrong in very interesting ways and led to a big breakthrough for me
when I understood them enough to know what was wrong with them. This lead to
my work of Foundational Mathematical Categories. Badiou wants to make Set
Theory the basis of Ontology by adding to it the Multiple and the Event. But in effect
he raises the question of the status of all the other possible foundations of
mathematics which he ignores. My work on Foundational Mathematical Categories
accepts all the foundations and tries to make sense of their relations to each other
17 Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. MIT Press, 2006. I

18 Ž iž ek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London : Verso, 2013
19 Ž iž ek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2009.
20 Zizek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment As a Political Factor. London: Verso, 2008
21 Zizek, Slavoj. The Invisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso, 2007.
22 Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique Ofideology. Duke University Press
Books, 2009.
23 Ž iž ek, Slavoj. "Looking Awry." Film and Theory : an Anthology. (2000).
24 Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. London Bloomsbury, 2014.
25 Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Place of publication not identified: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
5
based on C.S. Peirce and B. Fuller’s Philosophical Principles. It is difficult to know if
Zizek has it in him to produce a significant systematic work of his own philosophy
beyond explaining others. He is toying with attempting to apply his ideas about
Ideology to questions concerning Quantum Mechanics. It is not clear where that
might lead. Certainly the conundrums in Quantum Mechanics are as daunting as
those related to Ideology and the Unconscious. His explanations are brilliant, but
there is a fundamental lack of coherence to his work that tends to jump all over the
map in terms of subject matter. We appreciate that he has read everything under the
sun and then explained it to us in ways we can understand sometimes blowing our
minds in the process. But we have hopes that he will produce something more
substantive in the future like Badiou has done, but making a contribution that
makes sense and is not empty.
The best way to approach the most radical element of the thought of Deleuze is
through the Commentary on Difference and Repetition by Bryant called Difference
and Giveness26. This comes under the heading of the Second Copernican Revolution
that Deleuze proposes. The upshot of this breakthrough is that Deleuze has found a
reason in Kant for crossing out the Transcendental Ego. Lacan in his work has
cancelled out the Subject and Other (Das Mann). This technique of crossing out came
from Heidegger’s work where the crossing out of Being. Derrida and Lacan were at
ENS at the same time and Lacan’s use of this technique from Heidegger may have
prompted Derrida to look more deeply into it and to come up with Differance as
differing and deferring which is his interpretation of Hyper Being. Derrida’s work
served to found Lacan’s use of the erasure technique in his lectures on
Psychoanalysis. Deleuze was also at ENS and was also influenced by Lacan, but
Deleuze was exploring Wild Being following the indications of Merleau-Ponty
instead of exploring Hyper Being. But his explorations uncovered a deeper level of
crossing out of the Transcendental Ego. I have explained the implications of this in
my second essay on Generic Phenomenology. But briefly this is a more radical
decentering of Subjectivity than the crossing out of the Subject at the level of the
Cogito (Mundane Ego). Heidegger crosses out Being and his discovery of Hyper
Being prompts him to rethink the entire problematic of Fundamental Ontology
because he thought that perhaps he had opened up an infinite regress in the kinds of
Being. Instead in his own further work that he kept hidden from the world which
have only appeared recently he inverted the axiom of Ontological Difference and
produced in his Contributions to Philosophy: From Ereignis 27 and the auto-
commentaries28 the concept of Beyng which is embedded in the ontic and are not
distinguished from them. Beyng is onefold, strange and unique and gives rise to an
26 Bryant, Levi R. Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of
Immanence. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2008.
27 Heidegger, Martin, Richard Rojcewicz, and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event). ,
2012.
28 Heidegger, Martin, Parvis Emad, and Thomas Kalary. Mindfulness. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Heidegger,
Martin, and Martin Heidegger. The History of Beyng. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2015. Heidegger,
Martin, and Richard Rojcewicz. The Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
6
immanent sphere of the ontic in Heidegger’s attempt to describe a meontology 29. I
cannot find any example of Wild Being in Heidegger or Derrida or Lacan. Thus
Hyper Being is the highest meta-level of Being that they all explore as far as I have
discovered so far. And this is then the beginning point of Zizek and Badiou who are
basing their work on Lacan as well. However, in his later hidden work Heidegger
leaves Being behind thinking he has escaped Metaphysics and inverts the basic
assumption of Fundamental Ontology and finds another realm not related to the
meta-levels of Being. So far Zizek has not commented on Beyng in any substantial
way of which that I am aware. Also Badiou seems to be ignoring these newly
released hidden works by Heidegger for the time being.
We cannot say that Zizek completely ignores Wild Being. He treats it implicitly. And
this is the way he draws on Derrida from Grammatology in Sublime Object of
Ideology. Derrida provides the formula inside inside is outside. We could reverse that
and have the formula: inside is outside outside. In each case there is with the single
cross out an indication of the Hyper Being of Differance. And the point is that by
pushing further outside than outside or inside than inside the system of thought
being critiqued self-deconstructs. These deconstructive formulas would look like
this “inside3 || inside2 | inside1 is outside1” where ‘||” are the limits that are pushed
beyond to cause the collapse. The opposite logically possible formula is: “inside1 is
outside1 | outside2 || outside3”. A single “|” separator signifies a boundary of
juxtaposition. We do not have to do a destruction such as Heidegger proposes, i.e.
take the system apart ourselves, because the system of thought itself will self-
destruct if pushed past its limit as Derrida shows by identifying the silent
phenomenological voice30 in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Zizek uses the work of
Sohn-Rethel to construct a formula with four elements that combines these two
formulas that can be seen as possible from Derrida’s work on Grammatology. Zizek’s
formula is inside2 inside1 is outside1 outside2 which is developed implicitly in Sublime
Object of Ideology. The double strike Being as copula though can be seen implicitly
to represent Wild Being which is chiasmic and a reversibility of the two sides of the
formula based on the prior formulas derived from Derrida’s Grammatology31. This is
implicit not explicit in the structure that Zizek produces using the work Sohn-Rethel,
and we can see a similar structure implied in his work on Quantum Mechanics in
which we might formulate a similar formula which would be Quantum Mechanics |
Relativity Theory is Hegel’s Phenomenology | Hegel’s Logic. The bars “|” represent
interfaces fraught with paradox. In the case of the side related to Hegel it is the
paradox of Hegel interpreted through the surrealism of Lacan. The paradoxes
between Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics is well known. Implicit in all
this is the absurdity of Wild Being represented by ‘is’ doubly-struck-out, i.e. what is
left when the trace self-erases.
29 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Meontology
30 Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1996. Kates, Joshua. Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of
Deconstruction. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2005.
31 Derrida, Jacques, Gayatri C. Spivak, and Judith P. Butler. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2016.
7
Pushing beyond past Wild Being to Impossibility of Ultra Being basically repeats the
deconstructive moves of Derrida at the Wild Being level:
inside2 | inside1 is outside1 | outside2
inside3 || inside2 | inside1 X outside1 | outside2
inside2 | inside1 X outside1 | outside2 || outside3
We should be reminded here of the Divided Line of Plato that is affirmed in terms of
the differentiation of Knowledge by Aristotle. The Divided Line has four phases just
like these equations. It has two limits which are mixture (Metis) and supra-
rationality (Nous). These limits can be seen as the “||” points that need to be pushed
beyond to make deconstructive collapse occur. The interface between phases of the
line is defined by the copula at gives meta-levels of Being. The two phases are again
divided by the points of juxtaposition ‘|’. But in fact the meta-levels of being appear
at the limit of mixture as the intensity of that mixture. So Process Being relates to
contradiction, Hyper Being to paradox, Wild Being to absurdity and Ultra Being to
impossibility “X”. The equations give us a way to climb up through the meta-levels of
Being. They explicitly show how Zizek uses Wild Being to handle Hyper Being in the
Derrida Grammatological equations and to coopt it into a higher configuration of
juxtapositions that ultimately lead to the approach toward Impossibility of Ultra
Being. And we see specifically how Deleuze’s contributions to the understanding of
Wild Being contribute to Zizek’s being able to render commensurate the Hyper
Being treatments of Lacan and Hegel within the umbrella of Wild Being and how
these configurations are pressed further toward becoming an approach toward
Ultra Being. This is a kind of Simulacrum of the Divided Line that takes place in one
limit of that line, the limit of mixture, i.e. the screen on which figures dance within
the cave in an early analogy for Cinema that was very prescient of Plato to envisage.
In terms of the Divided Line there is the phase of Doxa and the Phase of Ratio. The
phase of Doxa is divided by Void the Taoist nondual, and the phase of Ratio is
divided by emptiness the Buddhist nondual. The central dividing line is
Manifestation, the utterly nondual conjunction of the dual nonduals of emptiness
and void such as we see in the work of Fa Tsang in Hua Yen Buddhism or in
DzogChen. We must remember that what Zizek is describing in terms of the
unconscious action of ideology within society is just the screen at the foot of the
Divided Line and not the line itself. The line itself concerns opinion and reason of
the person experiencing the cave, and what is beyond the cave. The cave represents
appearance and opinion. What is beyond the cave represents reason as it expresses
the influence of the Sun of the Good one of the nonduals of Being. The nonduals of
Being are Order, Right, Good, Fate, Sources and Roots. Sources and Roots are beyond
the limit of the supra-rational, notice that is the outward3 which pushes beyond the
limits of the Divided Line. Deleuze when he talks about the Simulacrum says instead
of going outside the cave we instead dig deeper and find nooks and crannies within
the cave itself which would represent inward3. Notice how the analogy of the Cave
reverses our expectations as to what should be inward and outward. The sun of the
8
Good is outward, and the intensification of dissimulation by the simulacrum is
further inward. Zizek is taking us deeper and deeper into the cranny within the nook
within the cave because he is taking us deeper into mixture through the surreal
trickery (Metis ) of his Master. Zizek hides within Wild Being as he manipulates
Hyper Being to pull the wool over the eyes of the Men of Earth, the ones who only
believe what they can hold in their hands, i.e. believe in sense certainty, like
Bertrand Russell. Plato only deals with those initiated into the lesser mystery, i.e.
the followers of Heraclitus who understand Becoming or Process Being, and the
ones who believe in the Greater Mystery who are the followers of Parmenides and
who understand Pure Being. But the Hierophant who initiates is the one who
understands Hyper Being and thus can pull the wool over the eyes of the initiates
and the Men of Earth. Lacan was that Initiator for his Psychoanalytic Community
that he created based on his methods for whom he was Master. But to take Lacan’s
ideas and to relate them to Hegel, a real master, needs even greater trickery, which
is what Zizek displays when he intra-converts the ideas of Lacan into the thoughts of
Hegel, and the ideas of Hegel into the musings of Lacan. Zizek treats Hegel’s work
under the sign of Erasure from Derrida and thereby is able to equate Hegel’s work
with that of Lacan. But he is only able to render them equal by using Wild Being as
his headland above the world from which he can measure the world making the
clothes of Hegel fit onto the body of Lacan to dress his ideas up to make them appear
as if they were rigorous enough to be considered philosophy of the unconscious.
Hegel already had a philosophy of the Unconscious32 that he took from Schelling,
and it was merely a matter of tuning it to look like the structural and semiotic view
of the unconscious developed by Lacan premised on surrealism.
It is not really even clear that Zizek is aware of this appeal to Wild Being as a basis
for his exploration of Hyper Being and the ground for the mutual interpretation of
Hegel and Lacan. He does not refer to it explicitly, it seems that it is a bit of trickery
that he is keeping up his sleeve following in the footsteps of his Master. But I would
not put it past him that this is a conscious use of the philosophy of Deleuze, since he
is a very sophisticated theorist and seems to understand Deleuze well. But his
implicit use of Wild Being to explicitly talk about interpreting Lacan and Hegel
based on Hyper Being is a problem for the interpreters of Zizek if they do not realize
that implicit appeal. This is precisely how Plato describes the Sophist working with
the Men of Earth in the dialogue where he defined the various levels of initiation
into knowledge of the unseen. We do not see anything similar in Badiou’s major
works which are more rational based on the approximation to Ultra Being as the
Event of the Ultra One arising from the Multiple to give us particulars that can
inhabit the scaffolding of Sets. For Zizek Ultra Being is the Lacanian Unconscious and
the impossibility is knowing anything about it if it is truly unconscious. These are
two completely different visions of Ultra Being but they are complementary. One
says that Ultra Being is behind whatever we produce as particulars to be placed in
Sets in our Ontology because everything we determine or distinguish comes based
32Mills, Jon. The Unconscious Abyss: Hegels Anticipation of Psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2002.
9
on the existence of the Ultra One appearing out of the Multiple. The Ultra Being of
Zizek on the other hand distorts the world through the unconscious operation of
ideology within society. Badiou is attacking reason through the unconscious sources
of the objects of mathematics. Zizek is laying down the structures of the unconscious
that is operating in the realm of opinion.
But what this implies is that it should be possible to critique Zizek based on a deeper
dive into Wild Being making our use of Wild Being by explicitly following the
direction that Deleuze pointed us in with his major works that both Badiou and
Zizek asked us to forget. Basically Deleuze is deeper than Zizek in an explicit way.
Zizek attempts to make use of Wild Being surreptitiously to get a viewpoint from
which he can do his mutual interpretation of Lacan and Hegel which is rooted in
seeing each in terms of Hyper Being. In a sense what he is doing is crossing out
Lacan and Hegel and producing a chimera or hybrid of their bodies of work as
something in Wild Being without drawing attention to its rootedness in Wild Being.
This method is similar to what Shankara did in his commentaries on the Upanishad.
Shankra adopted Emptiness as a standpoint and then interpreted Being as empty,
and from that structural standpoint he was able to reconcile the irreconcilable
differences between the different philosophies in the Upanishads. This was the
beginning of Avida Vadanta and the death knell of Buddhism in India which was
reabsorbed into Hinduism from which it was a heretical outcast. When Nagarjuna
showed that it was possible to see the breaks between the logical operators as the
indication of Emptiness at the heart of Logic, that was the beginning of the
rethinking of Hinduism based on the Buddhist critique of anatman. And thus arose
the concept of the Nirguna Brahman which was the basis for Vishnu as the nondual
between Shiva and Brahma thus uniting the religions of North and South India
between Tamil natives and Indo-European conquers. Buddhist Dharmas were
basically the Tattvas of Shaivism and Buddhism adopted the concept of Existence to
critique Being in Hindu philosophy. And this critique was eventually absorbed and
Hinduism was thus transformed by Shavite and Buddhist metaphysical ideas. Zizek
is doing something similar here by reconciling the irreconcilable by moving to a
level beyond them (Lacan and Hegel) when they are both interpreted as operating at
the level of Hyper Being but manipulated and equated from the viewpoint of Wild
Being. Zizek needs Hegel to give credence for his use of Lacan who was not a
philosopher. But this move signifies the total absorption of Psychoanalysis by
French Philosophy which we see in Zizek and Badiou who are both Lacanian
Analysts. Lacan profoundly influenced both Derrida and Deleuze who sought to
undergird his odd trickster and surreal psychoanalysis with some philosophical
grounding. Derrida merely reinterpreted Being (crossed out) and showed how it
could be used to undermine Husserl’s phenomenology and transform our reading of
Heidegger by reading it through Freud. Deleuze pushed further and worked out how
to cross out not merely the Mundane Ego (Cogito) as Subject but also the
Transcendental Ego of Apperception, the hidden unity of consciousness. You would
think that Zizek would want to build on both of these breakthroughs. And in fact he
does, but surreptitiously while in the foreground critiquing them to obfuscate his
10
borrowings from them. Badiou has a similar approach. But Badiou is a system
builder and Zizek is a cultural critic. Zizke is merely trying to establish the ground
for his cultural criticism. Both take as their point of departure their interpretation of
Lacan. Badiou tries to push beyond Deleuze by developoing a deeper theory of the
Multiple (difference as utterly incommensurable and heterogeneous) and thus a
deeper idea of the Emergent Event of the arising of the Ultra One which supplies
particulars to exist in the empty framework of Set Theory. Zizek on the other hand
does very fruitful critiques of cultural phenomena like cinema and literature, as well
as political ideologies based on the ideas of Lacan about the workings of the
Unconscious in terms of the Registers of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real and the
Anamorphic entities that appear to mediate them with respect to each other such as
the little piece of the real, objet petit a and phallus.
We know from N. Hellerstein (Diamond Logic33, Delta Logic34 derived from Laws of
Form35 of G. Spencer Brown) that there are two paradoxes (A yet B, B yet A) that are
possible in relation to each other. This leads to the series of Two contradictions (in
Process Being) produce a Paradox, two paradoxes (in Hyper Being) produce an
absurdity, two absurdities (in Wild Being) produce an impossibility (in Ultra Being).
Thus we can see that the paradoxicality of Lacan and the paradoxicality of Hegel can
be seen as these two paradoxes which are brought together as an absurdity by Zizek
who mutually interprets them and transforms them in the process into his own
philosophy rooted in Wild Being but looking down toward Hyper Being on both
sides as he crossed out the names Lacan and Hegel (at the level of Hyper Being) and
inscribes their philosophies with his own name Zizek (at the level of Wild Being)
bringing out as many absurdities between them as he is able. It is only Zizek’s
standpoint as far as I can tell that is associated with Wild Being. Recently he has
stopped critiquing Deleuze and in his latest large book Less Than Nothing has begun
explaining various facets of his philosophy. These explanations are quite cogent and
really help in the understanding of Deleuze. So my guess is that Zizek knows what
he is doing. He is operating at the level of Wild Being implicitly but talking explicitly
about Hyper Being. In taking this stance he is fundamentally dependent on Derrida
and Deleuze. Which he is hiding due to the anxiety of influence36 taking a page from
his Master. Here we see him giving us his map of misreading37. Lacan made some
wild guesses and turned out to be right about something. For instance, he was right
to introduce Eros or Desire back into Philosophy through the surreal picture of the
thought of the Cogito being the statement “I am lying” which similar to Godel’s move
on Russell in his Incompleteness Theorem. He was also right to use Being (crossed
out) from Heidegger early on to cross out the Subject and the Other. Derrida and
then Deleuze found ways to substantiate what he was doing philosophically which
led to some fascinating conceptual breakthroughs in philosophy. However, Deleuze
realized that in exploring Wild Being he had gone way beyond Lacan and that is why
33 Hellerstein, Nathaniel S. Diamond: A Paradox Logic. Hackensack, N.J: World Scientific, 2010.
34 Hellerstein, Nathaniel S. K. Delta: A Paradox Logic. Singapore: World scientific, 1997.
35 Spencer-Brown, George. Laws of Form. Leipzig: Bohmeier, 2015.
36 Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
37 Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford Univ Press, 2007.
11
he wrote Anti-oedipus38 and Thousand Plateaus39. Lacan forbade his students to
read these books. He realized that they spelled the end of his psychoanalysis which
could only be a dogma after Deleuze and Guattari had pushed beyond it out of the
realm of Hyper Being into the deeper realm of Wild Being. This is the threat that
Zizek and Badiou are attempting to fend off and avoid just as Lacan did. Both Zizek
and Badou want to explore Ultra Being, i.e. the unconscious itself as it appears to
philosophy in a profound way. Zizek sees it exemplified in Cultural artifacts and
Political ideologies. There are contradictions, paradoxes, absurdities and
impossibilities everywhere. Using an amalgam of Lacan and Hegel Zizek is able to
explain these seeming anomalies and bring then under a wider explanatory and
descriptive framework based on Freud’s work on the Unconscious, and Lacan’s
structural and semiotic explanation of Freud’s work centering on the explication of
Freud himself as seen in his work. This is the brilliant strategy of Lacan, seeing the
unconscious at work in Freud and his theory. For instance, Lacan’s Graphs of
Desire40 can be seen as the result of his struggle to understand and interpret Freud,
not the unconscious as such, but Freud’s attempt to make the unconscious conscious
as a theory. Derrida said that ultimately Freud’s insight was deeper than that of
Heidegger. Freud was treating Lethe rather than Alethia and Closure definitely is
prior to Disclosure. In this process Writing came into view as a fundamental
problem that was swept under the rug in Western ontotheology of presence and
logocentrism. Freud’s use of the Magic Writing pad gave an excellent example of the
idea of trace and arche-writing as a model of the Lethe of the Unconscious. The wax
substrate becomes a palimpsest. All the traces left in the substrate is a chaotic mess
like the Multiple. Traces vanish from the plastic overlay when it is picked up but
they do not vanish from the wax substrate which is the representative of the
Unconscious in this model. However, if the wax substrate is heated it would return
to being like the Tabula Rasa41 discussed by Locke. A full model of the arche-writing
would include the self-erasure of the traces as part of the process42.
There is no direct connection between the Philosophy of Delueze at the Wild Being
level and the stance of Zizek at the Wild Being level looking at manipulating the
relation between Lacan and Hegel at the Hyper Being level, crossing them both out.
Zizek is engaged in a kind of trick, where he eschews Wild Being but then uses it to
pull out the mutual erasure and transformation of the philosophies of Lacan and
Hegel. He does not have a philosophy that operates at the level of Wild Being such as
Deleuze tried to provide which resulted in an Anti-Lacanian stance along with
Guattari based on that philosophy built in Wild Being with the materials found
there. If we were to construct a Philosophy of Zizek at the Wild Being level it would
be quite different than what he is doing now. It would have to be a positive
38 Deleuze, Gilles, and Fé lix Guattari. Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2013.
39 Deleuze, Gilles, and Fé lix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007
40 Eidelsztein, Alfredo. The Graph of Desire: Using the Work of Jacques Lacan. London: Karnac, 2009
41 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Tabula_rasa
42 Hägglund, Martin. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life . Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press,
2008.
12
philosophy of Wild Being rather than the sophism that he normally engages in.
Interesting sophistries, but sophisms none the less, which we can tell from the fact
that they turn out to be just as nihilistic ultimately as the philosophy of Badiou. We
could instead try to figure out what a positive philosophy of Zizek at the level of
Wild Being could be. Or we could critique Zizek’s stance based on the philosophy of
Deleuze based in Wild Being. Or we could figure out what Deleuze’s own philosophy
of Transcendental Empiricism really means and try to make it more comprehensible
as has Daniel Smith43.
We choose the later course by going back into Genetic Phenomenology and to
attempt to extend that strand in Continental Philosophy that goes from Husserl, to
Heidegger, to Merleau-Ponty, which was touched on by Derrida, but the extended
further by Deleuze who followed the hints of Merleau-Ponty from The Visible and
Invisible concerning the Transcendental Field and developed a full blown
philosophy at the level of Chiasmic Wild Being. Derrida’s early critique of Genesis in
Husserl’s Phenomenology seems to have missed this boat because he did not include
courses but only published writings. My guess is that if we understood Deleuze
better the cultural critiques of Zizek would fall into place within that extended
realm. Beyond that it behooves us to look deeply into the late breaking news of
Beyng from Heidegger. Even though Zizek and Badiou are trying to explore Ultra
Being, there is not really much to be said about it except to understand it as a
unconscious limit. Rather the best we can do is what I try to do with the Aspectual
Field44 which is to talk about how it distorts the Transcendental Field around it.
Thus for the most part we are thrown back into Wild Being from Ultra Being as the
impossible limit of our inquiry. Wild Being plays as sense across the surface of the
event horizon of the singularity of Ultra Being. Thus by going only for this limit of
Ultra Being alone Badiou and Zizek have in some sense overshot the mark.
Ultimately we have to deal with Wild Being and the only other choice is Beyng which
cannot be understood unless we understand the meta-levels of Being generated by
Ontological Difference first. The best commentary of Heidegger’s idea of Beyng so
far is that of Backman called Complicated Presence45. Backman uses an analysis of
the hints that Heidegger left in his published work as a basis for interpreting the
hidden philosophy of Beyng. Even after all this time the newly published hidden
works of Heidegger are transforming our understanding since no one in the
tradition of Fundamental Ontology had the idea of overturning its primary
assumption which was Ontological Difference. So even after all this time Heidegger
is still the philosopher to be reckoned with yet again.
Beyond this there is the exploration of what really comes next after the
Metaphysical Era which we call the Heterochronic Era46. And we seem to nearing
the end of the Metaphysical with concepts like Beyng and by hitting the limit of the
Meta-levels of Being. Zizek’s work where everything is cancelled out seems like a
43 Smith, Daniel W. Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
44 https://www.academia.edu/9913285/Dreamtime_Structure_of_Inception
45 Backman, Jussi. Complicated Presence. State Univ Of New York Pr, 2016.
46 https://independent.academia.edu/KentPalmer/Heterochronic-Era
13
very late phenomenon metaphysically where everything is seen as ideological. But
what is left when everything has cancelled out in a Clearing of Being, that is what
Wild Being attempts to address. When we have an Emergent Event at the level of the
Metaphysical and Mythopoietic Eras that take us to a new era we are calling the
Heterochronic what is left after everything has cancelled to start again ordering and
organizing things in a new era? Deleuze attempted to answer this question. Zizek is
still talking about the cancellation process by which Ideology itself as Maya/Mara
vanishes through our critique of it. Deleuze’s philosophy was born in 1968, during
the Student Uprisings which Deleuze identified with. It is a deeply revolutionary
philosophy. Zizek’s motto when asked if he would support a Communist revolution
was if at first you do not succeed try, try again. In other words Zizek is actually very
conservative from the point of view of Communism. And it is clear though that
communism is not revolutionary enough, at least as seen from the point of view of
Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production47. Deleuze was engaged in actively building
up a new picture of what it is to be human as seen in Anti-Oedipus and Thousand
Plateaus looking at the Desiring Machines, Individual as Body-without-Organs and
Socius. And what always impressed us about this theory is how well it aligns with
Special Systems Theory. Zizek has no positive image of how to make things different,
but is engaged instead in endless cultural and political critique based on seeing
ideology as the embodiment of the workings within society of the unconscious. It is
good to get rid of the ideological hold that the culture has on us. We put on the
glasses from They Live and see the ideological messages behind the Corporate
marketing slogans and propaganda practiced by big Media organizations. But
ultimately we don’t just want to get rid of the illusions of ideology, but rather we
want a positive picture of how things might be different. Deleuze has that positive
picture that goes beyond the trickery of Lacan. If we turn Hegel into Lacan, this does
not make it any less tricky. It still does not answer our craving for something new
and different that Foucault and Deleuze were offering in their heyday and are still
offering. Some combination of Foucault and Deleuze is deeper than the endless
critique by Zizek of ideology and the hegemony of Set Theory as Ontology from
Badiou. Ultimately we have to come to terms with the discontinuities produced in
the history of the tradition as Emergent Events in Paradigm changes, Episteme
revolutions, and in Epochs of Being or as the transformation at the highest level of
the tradition moving from Metaphysical and Mythopoietic Eras on to the next Era
whatever that may be. Understanding the Heterochronic Era is a big task that is left
so far undone. This task has been defined fairly rigorously by Rajesh Sampath in
Four-Dimensional Time48. We tackle this challenge by developing a model of
Emergent Time49. Zizek cannot see beyond the trees of culture that are to be
critiqued one by one to the whole forest that may change under ecological pressure
when the Era changes fundamentally. What changes and what stays the same in the
Emergent Event. That has been my question that I have worked on over the years.
47 Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975.
48 Sampath, Rajesh. Four-dimensional Time: Twentieth Century Philosophies of History in Europe. San
Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999.
49 forthcomming
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Recently Zizek wrote a short book on the Event50 and pulled together the various
theories that are floating around about it. But it is fairly clear that Zizek does not
think anything is going to change fundamentally and that he will be doing the same
critique of culture and philosophy till the cows come home. Deleuze had a vision of a
way to look at things that would make our experience different at a fundamental
level beyond just putting on the ideology revealing glasses. We should at least try to
see if we can make sense of this positive vision of Deleuze before conceding to
perpetual criticism without any hope of going beyond that to something else.
Of course, understanding Deleuze is not easy. But it is clear that he dedicated his
later period to the overthrow of the Lacanian view of things and attempted to offer a
positive alternative at the Wild Being level. Basically we need to go back and study
the Genetic Phenomenology theme from Husserl, to Heidegger, to Merleau-Ponty
(and Sartre), as it leads through Derrida to Deleuze. This turns out to be a very
interesting thread through Continental Philosophy. And the whole thread itself gives
some insight into where Deleuze might be heading in his “Second Copernican
Revolution” by erasing the Transcendental Ego and concentrating on the
Transcendental Field instead which is what Heidegger called Dasein, Fink called the
third ego, Husserl called the Monad and Merleau-Ponty called the anonymous
prepersonal reflexive body embodying perception of sense. But it means following
the lead of Donn Welton in The Other Husserl51 to see the Genetic Phenomenology
in Husserl clearer. And then the lead of Joe Hughes52 in seeing that Deleuze is
following up on the work of Husserl on Genetic Time. Then we can appreciate better
the commentary of Levi Bryant53 on Difference and Repetition that focuses on the
meaning of the “Second Copernican Revolution” in Deleuze. We need to keep in
mind what Derrida said about Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy54. Zizek and Badiou
are a departure from this thread of Genetic Phenomenology in the Continental
Tradition that seems to have gotten lost until recently. This underlies the and
underwrites the move to explore different meta-levels of Being by the various
philosophers that recognized Genesis as a key idea going back to Husserl. Even
Foucault talks about it in his book the Order of Things55 when he projects what the
50 Ž iž ek, Slavoj. Event. London: Penguin Books, 2014

51 Welton, Donn. The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology . Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2000. See also Steinbock, Anthony J. Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After
Husserl. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1995
52 Hughes, Joe. Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation. London: Continuum, 2008. Hughes, Joe. Philosophy
After Deleuze: Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation Ii. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012.
53 Bryant, Levi R. Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of
Immanence. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2008.
54 Derrida, Jacques. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003. Lawlor, Leonard. Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology . Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2002. Marrati, Paola. Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger. Stanford,
Calif: Stanford University Press, 2005.
55 Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences . London: Routledge, 1989.
15
new post-human period might be like. Zizek more or less fulfills that
prognostication. But Foucault has also prophesized that this will be a Deleuzian
Century. It will be interesting to see whether it becomes generally recognized that
the Philosophy of Deleuze rooted in Wild Being is deeper than that of Zizek that
fuses Lacan and Hegel at the level of Hyper Being with a toe hold in Wild Being, but
without staking out any ground there.
Aspectual Field and Anamorphic Entities
One of the most important things that Zizek has picked up from Lacan and explained
and explicated with myriad examples is the registers of Symbolic, Imaginary and
Real and their relations to Anamorphic Eventities such as the little piece of the real,
the phallus and the objet petit a. We can see this in Sublime Object of Ideology and
Looking Awry as well as elaborated in Parallax View. From the point of view of
cultural Criticism this is one of the major tools that Lacan has provided Zizek which
is generally useful. However, we can get a picture of the relation between Zizek’s
thought and that of Deleuze through the transformation of this trope. The first point
is that this triangle of registers with their associated Anamorphic entities are just
part of the a more complete picture unbeknownst to Zizek. The symbolic register
refers to language and that is related to the aspect of Being Truth. Thus we are
getting a picture of the relation of the True to the Real via their anti-aspects Illusion
and Fiction that give us a confluence in the Imaginary. The imaginary is a
fundamental faculty which has the capability of producing worlds with different
timelines not aligned with the phenomenal given world and its timeline according to
Husserl. The key point is that Being has four aspects which are Truth, Reality,
Identity and Presence and these have anti-aspects which are Fiction, Illusion,
Difference and Absence. We can get a phenomenal field related to the aspects by
taking each pair of aspects and forming a confluence with their anti-aspects. This
would give us six flags, pennants or triangles that the complete phenomenal field
would be composed of under the auspices of the aspects. Lacan and Zizek are only
describing one of these pennants. The aspects form a tetrahedron and the lines
between the aspects are properties. For the Formal System these properties are
clarity, consistency and completeness. When we add Reality to these we get three
other properties which are verifiability, validity and coherence. Thus in each case
the confluence is associated with not just the two anti-aspects but also an anti-
property. Imagination in this case is related to unverifiable as well as illusion and
fiction. The complete aspectual field is associated with six pennants coming off the
tetrahedral connectors between the aspects. Each of the antipodes of the pairs of
aspects are confluences of two anti-aspects and an anti-property. These flags or
pennants with their confluences point toward Ultra Being via the six impossibilities
that Alice of Wonderland imagines before breakfast. Ultra Being is the center of the
Aspectual Field that warps it and shatters it. However, we start out with a model of a
Formal System on the surface. It is this model that the Cogito or Mundane Ego is
concerned with. We only encounter the Transcendental Ego of apperception of Kant
as we move toward Reality. In that move we give up external relations and turn to
relations within consciousness itself which we might call interface relations that are
16
only interested in the interface between Transcendental Ego and Mundane Ego and
nothing external. And this is the realm of Static and Constitutional Phenomenology
of Husserl. The Transcendental Ego is defined by Bracketing (Epoche) in Husserl’s
early phenomenology. The center of this Self-consciousness rooted in the unity of
apperception is a concern with coherence of consciousness itself and its experience.
It is concerned with verification and validation of the specifications of consciousness
against ideas of Space and Time as well as the Logical Categories of Kant. In other
words Reality is something seen as generated inwardly and passively as the basis
for the active Mundane Cogito. And this aligns with the unexpected feature of the
aspects when they are aligned with the Philosophical Principles of Peirce and Fuller,
which is that Identity is a First (isolate), Truth is a Second (relata), Presence is a
Third (continua) and Reality is a fourth (synergy). Thus Reality is encompassing of
the other aspects of Being. It is not something separately outside but instead
everything is in it as a form of higher level synthesis. Note also that if we add up all
the other Principles we get five dimensions rather than four, and thus there is an
excess, this points to the fact that if there is another aspect then that would be
Meaning as Sixth (integrity). If there was a zeroth aspect that would be Existence.
The key point is that Godel has told us that we can have completeness or
consistency in our Formal System but not both. If one is in Pure Being then the other
property is forced to be in Process Being. The same thing is probably true of
clarity/coherence and verification/validation. The difference between Pure Being
and Process Being is Hyper Being. Thus we are forced to deal with the difference
that makes a difference between Pure Being and Process Being (Becoming) whether
we want to or not and that is Hyper Being or what Derrida calls Differance. Hyper
Being is an expansion of being-in-the-world and therefore there must as Merleau-
Ponty tells us in The Visible and Invisible the opposite of Hyper Being which is Wild
Being, i.e. the contraction of being-in-the-world. The ultimate contraction would be
to fall into the singularity of Ultra Being. Wild Being appears between the surface of
the aspectual tetrahedron with its positive properties and the depth in which the
flags with their confluences point toward Ultra Being. Ultra Being is like the Eternal
that messes with temporality before time gets going as seen in Kierkegaard56. It is
Ultra Being that Zizek and Badiou want to explore. But Ultra Being is the thing-in-
itself or absolute noumena as singularity. Thus no matter how much you know
about the ultra-one coming out of the Multiple as an Event you will still not know
anything about Ultra Being itself. No matter how much you know about the
warpages of society and culture by ideology you will still not know about the drives
in the unconscious of the people who create that culture as a reification. In Badiou
that ultimate unknown is the arising of the Ultra One out of the Multiple as an Event
to become a particular in a Set. In Zizek it is whenever he talks about something
being an Impossible, which is quite often. Hyper Being is flaw or dehiscence
between Pure and Process Being at the surface of the aspectual tetrahedron because
pairs of properties must be assigned to different modes of Being. Thus whatever
formal systems we build must be fragmented in their relation to reality by Hyper
56 Kangas, David J. Kierkegaard's Instant: On Beginnings. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 2010
17
Being. But when we begin to explore the flags or pennants of the Aspectual Field we
are engaging in the exploration of Wild Being which is the surface of sense within
the transcendental field (dasein, monad, prepersonal anonymity of the body) that is
distorted by Ultra Being that is at the center of the field and pointed at by the
confluences that are the points of the pennants indicating Ultra Being. It is really
Deleuze that laid out this structure of Wild Being as a transcendental field composed
of the desiring (avoiding, absorbing, disseminating) machines (machinations,
practices) that form a rhizome across the bodies, the individual body-without-
organs and the socius around the impossibility of Ultra Being. Cornelius Castoriadis
talks about it in the Imaginary Institution of Society57 as Magma. Sartre talks about it
in Critique of Dialectical Reason58 as the fused group. Canetti talks about it in
Crowds and Power59 as the pack of hunters working as a team. Zizek has adopted
this social field through Lacan’s registers Symbolic, Imaginary and Real with their
anamorphic eventities and decided that he wanted to explore the way the
unconscious appears in our society as ideology based on his interpretation of Lacan
via Hegel. But actually we really cannot know anything about Ultra Being as such but
only about the field itself that is made up of the surface senses60 of Wild Being. So
the fact that both Badiou and Zizek eschew the discoveries of Deleuze in his
philosophy of Wild Being is not just a major problem but in some sense a
catastrophe because it renders their analysis moot because it skips the sense at the
surface and goes for the depths that Deleuze warns us about.
Once we understand the Aspecutual Transcendental Field and its structure and its
relation to the kinds of Being then the next thing is to understand the anamorphic
eventities that appear associated with each side of any given triangle within the
field. What we have discovered is that the Transcendental Field is Deleuze’s version
of what Heidegger calls Dasein and Husserl calls following Leibniz the Monad. What
we are talking about is the prepersonal and anonymous basis of consciousness.
Dasein can be thought of as the interface between the Transcendental Ego and the
Mundane Ego. Merleau-Ponty associates it with the anonymousness of the body (as
in reflexes). There is in Genetic Phenomenology an evolution of the understanding
of this anonymous self prior to the arising of subject and object that experiences
primordial or existential time. Husserl was the first to posit the idea of a person
prior to subjectivity and objectivity which he called the monad. Heidegger adopted it
and called it Dasein as the basis for a formal indication of the phenomena of
projection. Then Merleau-Ponty associated it with the body, and finally Deleuze
following Merleau-Ponty calls it the Transcendental Field. It is called
Transcendental because it includes lacune that are invisibilities and so
phenomenology alone cannot access it in its totality. It is folded up, it self-inersects,
and it contains singularities that are opaque61. Merleau-Ponty sees our perceptual
field as the prototype for the social field and the field of consciousness that combine
57 Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005
58 Sartre, Jean-Paul, and Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre. Critique of Dialectical Reason. London: Verso, 2009.
59 Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. London: Phoenix, 2000.
60 See Logic of Sense by Deleuze
61 Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
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in the Transcendental Field. This field we can see as the Aspectual Field within its
attached anamorphic eventities. The anamorphic eventities are attached to the
perspectives that appear in the projection process. Lacan and Zizek have identified
three of them, but there are eighteen of them in all. The transcendental field also has
singularities within it. The singularities provide a network of anchor points within
the field. These are like the division by zero anomalies within the Sedenion Hyper
Compex Algebra. The field may also have lines of self-intersection like the Boy’s
Surface and the Roman Surface. But beyond the singularities there is also the
anamorphic objects that appear within the field as leverage points for moving and
transforming perspectives in our anagogic logic. Also we should add that in the
middle of each triangular pennant there is also a whirlpool of Jouissance or some
other resource or quicksand mire to get caught in. It reminds you of a golf course
with the sand trap pits and uneven terrain. The pennants of the field point to the
trees that are off of the course. The Anamorphic objects are like the points that you
aim for in order to play close to Par. Golf is the only game with non-flat playing field.
Anamorphic entities are leverage points for change while the resources or
quicksand in the center are more negative obstacles, more or less like the game
snakes and ladders with help and obstacles randomly assigned to the field.
We have explained the existence of the anamorphic eventities on the basis of the
concept of the eject elsewhere, i.e. something that is an entity prior to the
appearance of subject and object that appears with Dasein. The example is the
plencenta, which once ejected becomes abject. But it shows that there are moments
with the Dasein of non-dasein. And it is these moments when Dasein is setup
projecting points of view and fields of vision that appear together with Dasein and
are part of the system of perspectives, part of their dynamic that leads to anagogic
swerves (clineman). We are assuming a phenomenology here like that of Aron
Gurwitsch which is more sophisticated than that of Husserl. In his phenomenology
there is theme, thematic field (system as gestalt) and fringe or margin (meta-system
as proto-gestalt). The fringe or margin concern what we are aware of but which is
not part of the intentional structure of our concern. Noise and interference come
from this fringe. But many other structures that underlie the intentionality of
consciousness are also rooted there. But if Theme and Thematic Field are like the
figure and ground of the gestalt but in consciousness as the modifications of
intentionality, then the fringe or margin of awareness which is not part of the
intentional gestalt or figure of background could be seen as a proto-gestalt, which is
the term for the meta-system (general economy) as opposed to the system
(restricted economy). Here we refer to the extended political economy of Bataille in
Accursed Share62. There is no phenomenology that completely incorporates the idea
of the duality between system/meta-system or gestalt/proto-gestalt which could
explain many preconscious or unconscious features of experience. And to that we
need to add the dual related to process/meta-process which is flow/proto-flow.
62Bataille, Georges, and Robert Hurley. Accursed Share. Zone Bks., U.S, 1992. Bataille, Georges, and Georges
Bataille. The Accursed Share: 2/3. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
19
These terms are defined in my paper on Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special
Systems Theory63. Anamorphic entities are examples of Holons, or Special Systems.
Deleuze does not really deal with anamorphic objects that Lacan and Zizke talk
about as far as I am aware. So this partial description of the Registers Symbolic,
Imaginary and Real and their relation to Anamorphic eventities is a real advance
which we can take to heart and use to describe the entire Aspectual Field. But we
can understand the nature of the Aspectual Field itself as the transcendental Field of
Deleuze, and as the transformation of the Monad of Husserl and Dasein of Heidegger
via Merleau-Ponty’s mediations on the body and the chiasmic nature of touch
touching, which has an opacity to it in its reversibility and chiasm. Deleuze has
abandoned Phenomenology because of his Second Copernican Revolution in which
the deeper subject, i.e. Transcendental Ego, is no longer at the center. But his
extended Transcendental Empiricism encompasses Phenomenology and describes
the transcendental field that exists between the Transcendental Ego and the
Mundane Ego but which is different from either of them in as much as it is a surface
on which manifests sense. This description is quasi-phenomenological once you
understand the terms, and Deleuze is calling this quasi-phenomenology a
Transcendental Empricism, that also deals with absence and Letheia as well as
presence and Aletheia. Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism deals with things that
never appear. This is what Michael Henry calls The Essence of Manifestation64. And
it takes seriously the embeddedness of the self in the socius as mitsein. We might
call the socius as mitsein the Ultimate Ego and contrast it with the Absolute Ego of
Hegel, i.e. Objective Spirit. Between the Ultimate and Absolute Ego (Das Mann, Big
Other) exists the Spirit as an interspace. And between the Ultimate Ego and the
Transcendental Ego exists the Soul as an interspace.
We can understand this as a cycle such as that which Berger and Luckmann in
Social Construction of Reality65 describe of exteriorization, objectification and
interiorization. Zizek explains the three kinds of reflection of Hegel as positing,
externalizing, and determinate66. These two dialectical triads together define a cycle
that starts with the Transcendental Ego which posits reflectively and transforms the
internalized content and gives it to the Cogito or Mundane Ego which then does
external reflection and externalizes the its own content which is taken in or
absorbed by the Absolute Ego (the public as Other) that reifies and objectifies it and
does a determinate reflection on the relation of form and content. This is the public
reception of a work of art for example by the artist. That work of art may be a
painting of a pipe by adding the saying “this is not a pipe”, i.e. “this is a lie”. Then
there is internalization from the Public, Big Other, Das Mann of the Absolute Ego by
the individual of the reaction to his work. And then here is a moment that is not
63 Palmer, K. D. (2000). "Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory" Reflexive Autopoietic
Systems Theory (Electronic ed). Ed. Kent Palmer. Orange: Apeiron Press (http://archonic.net/apeiron.htm).
64 Henry, Michel. The Essence of Manifestation. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1973.
65 Berger, Peter L, and Luckmann Thomas. The Social Construction of Reality. Open Road Media, 2011.
66 Ž iž ek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2009.
20
reflective but rather refractive or diffractive67 in which the total reaction from the
outside is absorbed by the individual. Just like the Ultimate Ego (fused group, pack,
magma, mitsein, socius) is not separated out from the Absolute Ego so to this
moment of refraction and diffraction is missed in Hegel’s analysis and Zizek’s
interpretation. This is a four part process one phase of which is not a reflection. But
once you understand it as a cycle with four parts then it makes a lot more sense.
There are four judgements in Hegel as Zizek explains68 but only three reflections.
Why this asymmetry? It is because the mitsein has been forgotten and the moment
of refraction and diffraction lost in oblivion as an interior moment similar to that
which Bergson wants to ascribe to pure time without any spatial contamination69.
But we immediately notice that this also falls in the structure of the equations of
Zizek and Derrida derived from Grammatology and developed to the Wild Being
level by Zizek.
Transcendental Ego2 | Mundane Ego1 is Ultimate Ego1 | Absolute Ego2 (formula 1 balance at Wild
Being level)
Ultimate Ego3 || Transcendental Ego2 | Mundane Ego1 is Absolute Ego1 (formula 2 Hyper Being
deconstruction)
Absolute Ego 1 is Transcendental Ego 1 | Mundane Ego 2 || Persona3 (formula 3 Hyper Being
deconstruction)
Notice that Ultimate Ego and Persona in formulas 2 and 3 fall outside the limits and
are thus the cause of deconstructive cascades, but at the level of Wild Being these
deconstructive collapses are stabilized as in formula 1. Thus the difference and the
segregation of the Ultimate Ego and the Persona (mask) can be explained by the
deconstructive formulas from Grammatology. If in Formula 1 we see the RHS as the
individual body-without-organs and the LHS as the socius, then it is clear that the
desiring/avoiding//absorbing/disseminating machanations and practices within
the transcendental field are the structural content that allows the two sides of the
equation to transform across the surface of Wild Being (is). This means that we can
see how to reconcile this fundamental structure taken from Hegel and used by Zizek
to interpret Lacan in relation to the anti-Lacanian field theory produced by Deleuze
and Guattari. In the process we correct some of its deficiencies because we have a
wider perspective from the vantage point of Wild Being.
With Zizek you will get a critique of conceptual structures but not quasi-
phenomenological, transcendental empirical descriptions of experience. Lacan and
Hegel as reinterpreted are treated as dogma by Zizek. The goal is reconciliation at all
costs70 whether it actually makes sense with regard to experience or not. Deleuze’s
whole purpose is to give us tools to make sense. It goes back to what Husserl talks
67 Barad, Karen M. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007
68 Zizek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment As a Political Factor. London: Verso, 2008.
69 Massey, Heath. The Origin of Time: Heidegger and Bergson. Albany: SUNY Press, 2016.
70 As in Less Than Nothing
21
about in Formal and Transcendental Logic71 and Experience and Judgement72 which
is whether the genuine meaning is found or whether we are playing games. Zizek is
playing an elaborate game attempting to align Lacan and Hegel against all odds and
ultimately and transforming both in the process. This gives us a very sophisticated
version of Lacan, that Lacan himself could not have understood. And which is
probably a big distortion of Hegel, at the very least reading him through Derrida’s
Difference. Although it is interesting how many points of correspondence that Zizek
has found and just how much he has to twist Lacan or Hegel to get them to fit
together. Hegel is ostensibly the hardest of all Western Philosophers to understand,
and Lacan is cryptic and elusive on purpose. The fact that Zizek can make any sense
out of the two is pretty amazing. But the fact that he can find syntheses that allow us
to find common ground between these two theorists does not mean that those
syntheses have anything to do with what we experience as transcendental or
mundane or empirically or any other way. Out of the plethora of ideas that Zizek
manages to salvage from Lacan and justify through Hegel, if we can take a few and
relate them to the basic framework of Deleuze then that would be progress. And we
can definitely do that with the anamorphic entities that are seen to arise in the
transcendental field as something other than the singularities that appear there.
And this helps us to understand the Transcendental Field better and see how in this
case Lacan has seen something that the Phenomenologists have missed about the
nature of experience. It also helps us to understand how starting with Pure and
Process Being we are introduced to Hyper Being and then Wild Being on the way to
Ultra Being. Thus we can get a good picture of the relation of the thought of Deleuze
to that of Zizek and Badiou even though they don’t seem to have much of a relation
to each other directly because the thought of Zizek and Badiou take off directly from
Lacan appropriating much of Derrida and Deleuze surreptitiously. They are not in
the thread of Genetic Phenomenology and so they are defining formalisms and
crossing them out and not describing experience per se. They are trying to make
Lacanian dogma relevant. Deleuze is trying to transform how we think about what is
best in Lacan. Deleuze with Guattari are trying to define a socially based type of
therapy not dependent on the Psychoanalyst as Master/Trickster/Sophist. Zizek is
trying to be the Paul to Lacan as Jesus who told many parables that few understood.
Instead it is we who are knocked from our mount on the road to Damascus as he
convinces us that some new strange counterintuitive thing is truer than whatever
we believed in the first place. The intellectual pyrotechiques is impressive. But what
do we know afterwards. Zizek says it is what you do after you go home from the
protest that matters. What happens after we read Zizek and are impressed by him
and given some insight. I would argue that although we are addicted to him because
he crushes our illusions in fascinating ways, that not much changes as a result of this
illumination. We don’t really have a new way of looking at ourselves and the world
other than to see that it is full of ideologies that we had not expected or detected.
Negation of the illusions is one thing, and placing another way of looking at things in
71Husserl, Edmund. Formal and Transcendental Logic. The Hague: Nijhoff, 2010.
72Husserl, Edmund, Ludwig Landgrebe, James S. Churchill, and Karl Ameriks. Experience and Judgment:
Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1997.
22
their place is another. Deleuze has that potential to restructure our way of looking at
our experience. But this does not affect the fact that all the illusions cancel
themselves out when we reach Ultra Being that generated them.
My own approach has been to take what seems interesting in Lacan as explained by
Zizek and then try to test it by applying it to something. Then if it holds up I try to
see how I can use it as a tool within the overall context of the relations between the
kinds of Being or the Aspects of Being. In the case of anamorphic objects it is
something new not covered by Deleuze as far as I can see. They are very useful
when we apply them to understanding the structure of the Transcendental Field and
they have interpretive power that can be exploited in analyzing cultural artifacts. In
this way we expand what Deleuze is telling us about the Transcendental Field within
Transcendental Empiricism and thus it adds to our understanding of Genetic
Phenomenology. Genetic Phenomenology and Deleuze’s adherence to it and his
attempt to extend it in vital ways is what gives a good ground for understanding
experience better. And what Lacan interpreted by Zizek has to say is valuable for
that purpose as well. I have not found Badiou’s work as valuable in that regard. In a
way what Kierkegaard has to say about the interference that Eternity makes in Time
is more profound than the later elucidations of that same point by Zizek and Badiou.
But both Zizek and Badiou are helpful in framing the problem in a more
contemporary context. For Deleuze this is the theme of the Dark Precursor73 which
does the same thing within the Immanent realm. It is Zizek that made that clear.
When Zizek comments on Deleuze without attempting to show he is an idiot then
that is very helpful as he did many times in Less Than Nothing. It is less helpful
when Zizek is trying to put down Derrida and Deleuze in order to obfuscate his
dependence on them. Harrold Bloom’s Map of Misreading and Anxiety of Influence is
a blatant phenomenon in Zizek’s work that we have to be constantly on our guard
against.
So we find ourselves in a difficult situation. Zizek is attempting to reach for the gold
and understand Ultra Being. He is using his conflation of Lacan and Hegel to get
there transforming their joint philosophies into his own in the process. But he has
apparently missed a step along the way which is Deleuze’s contribution to the
understanding of Wild Being. This throws off Zizek’s whole project and he tries to
obfuscate that by attacking Deleuze. Deleuze because he is extending Genetic
Phenomenology and is describing experience not just some dogma Lacan set up is
definitely deeper than Zizek. However, Zizek has implicitly one foot in the realm of
Wild Being even though his is loath to admit it. That standing in Wild Being makes
his project feasible of crossing out the names of both Lacan and Hegel and
substituting his own name as the only one who can make their works make sense.
Deleuze on the other hand like Badiou is a system builder and is attempting to
advance a positive notion of Transcendental Empricism rooted in exclusively in
73Kaufman, Eleanor. Deleuze, the Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2012.
23
Immanence and following Neitzsche in that74. The system that Badiou is building is
just warmed over Set Theory taken to be Metaphysics but Badoiu uses the idea of
the Multiple that was radicalized from Deleuze and came ultimately from Husserl.
Badiou also uses the term Event which is prominent both in the late Heidegger and
Deleuze. It seems that Badiou is only useful in what he gets wrong, which leads to
other better thoughts such as Foundational Mathematical Categories75. Badiou is his
own dogmatist. It is Zizek that makes the most sense out of the two of them. But that
sense is limited by the gymnastics he has to perform to get Lacan and Hegel to agree.
It is fun I grant you that. But we would like more to come out of it all than
intellectual entertainment. In the end we are not going to be able to use the insights
of Zizek unless we understand them in the context of Wild Being, which Zizek is
using himself surreptitiously. We cannot avoid Wild Being if we are going to really
understand Ultra Being. We need to deconstruct Zizek’s use of Hegel and Lacan one
notion at a time and critique it and then see if it adds anything to our understanding
of actual experience. So far the most interesting elements are the anamorphic
eventities associated with Symbolic, Imaginary and Real and the equation with four
terms that adds to the three term equations from Grammatology of Derrida. And
there are also other things of value that are discovered along the way as we are
reading Zizek. I would encourage anyone who has not read his works to read them.
And it is also worth reading all his major works mentioned in this article. However,
they must be taken with a grain of salt. And that grain should be constituted out of
Wild Being which is precisely what Zizek has swept under the carpet. Zizek is a bit
like a Spinoza who has identified all of creation with the God of Ideology. Everything
appears in the Parallax View between Lacan and Hegel. In comparison Sloterdijk is
like Lebniz with all his bubbles76. But there is another tradition that harkens back to
Descartes which is in a line with Kant and Husserl, and that develops a genetic
phenomenology as a thread linking the various names in Continental Philosophy in
important ways and Deleuze is part of that chain. It describes experience and if we
cannot call it Phenomenology any longer we will call it Transcendental Empiricism.
But I would probably prefer Michael Henry’s idea of calling it Hyletic or Material
Phenomenology77. I prefer Henry’s approach to Ultra Being as the Essence of
Manifestation, i.e. that which never appears, i.e. the truly unconscious.
Transcendental Empiricism was actually designed to go beyond Lacan explicitly via
the ‘Second Copernican Revolution’ of Deleuze that decenters the Transcendental
Ego. It is really a phenomenology that includes invisibilities, self-intersection, and
singularities in the transcendental field. It was designed to describe experience not
merely reconcile irreconcilable philosophies to produce a philosophical dogma that
makes sense out of Lacanian psychoanalysis78. And ultimately Deleuze’s thought is
deeper than Zizeks the way it is given to us at this moment. Zizek’s debt to Deleuze
and Derrida is enormous, but that is mostly unacknowledged. But Zizek cannot
really reach his goal of understanding Ultra Being without coming to terms with
74 Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. London ; New York : Bloomsbury, 2013.
75 https://www.academia.edu/9913135/Meta-Logic
76 Sloterdijk, Peter, and Wieland Hoban. Bubbles: Microspherology . Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext(e, 2011.
77 Henry, Michel, and J S. Davidson. Material Phenomenology. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008.
78 Lacan, Jacques, Alan Sheridan, and Malcolm Bowie. É crits: A Selection. London: Routledge, 2008.
24
Deleuze not just standing in Wild Being to manipulate Hyper Being like the Sophists
who trick the men of earth. But what is missing is an actual positive philosophy of
Wild Being that Deleuze tried to give us which is what is lacking in order to truly
come to terms with Ultra Being like Kierkegaard tried to do. Or like Nietzsche tried
to do in Zarathustra under the interpretation of Seung by adopting the Spinoza ideal
approach to nature as purely immanent but the expression of God through the
expression of man. There are two transcendental realms here in contention. There is
the transcendental realm of the unconscious which Deleuze calls the depths. These
depths in Zizek express themselves in our culture as distortions in the cultural
products such as ideologies. Ideologies are just rumors on steroids, a kind of group
think. Thus when we see the paradoxes and absurdities they embody we are seeing
unconscious phenomena right under our noses in the mundane world. But what is
missing is an understanding of the surface phenomena that Deleuze points toward
as the realm of sense. That is on the surface of the unconscious, or the surface of the
transcendental field of consciousness. Deleuze draws our attention to that surface
where sense and nonsense are distinguished. Zizek assumes it as the basis for his
work mutually interpreting Lacan and Hegel. But he is not exposing it as a positive
theory about the way things are in our world as Deleuze does. Attempting to
understand that surface of sense that is the transcendental field is the edge that
Deleuze has on Zizek. Any sense that Ideologies might have either before or after
critique come from that surface at which sense and nonsense are distinguished by
us. And that is why Deleuze is deeper, ironically it is because he sticks to the surface
of things. In our language we cannot give a complement by saying that something is
more superficial than something else, so we have to say something paradoxical
which is that Deleuze is deeper than Zizek because he sticks to the surface. Zizek
shows us that the unconscious is alive and well as ideology in society. And a wild
combination of Lacan and Hegel mutually reinterpreted helps us to see that hidden
depth in life. But it is Deleuze and the surface of things with its cracks like Malcom
Lowry describes in Under the Volcano that gives us a genuine insight into how
things could be different if we had a new positive theory of the way things are
constituted through Transcendental Empiricism. And this new approach is precisely
what Zizek is failing to find himself. Unfortunately Zizek has rejected Deleuze up to
this point. Ironically it is Deleuze that Zizek is actually seeking since he is already
standing in Wild Being, but merely not exploring it, but using it only as the basis for
his reconciliation of Lacan and Hegel. We hope that Zizek ultimately realizes the
error of his ways and reembraces Deleuze ultimately without any unnecessary
buggery.
25

Zizek Verses Deleuze

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Zizek Verses Deleuze

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Zizek verses Deleuze

Why is Deleuze’s Philosophy deeper than that of

Kent Palmer Ph.D.

Key Words: Zizek, Deleuze

1 http://independent.academia.edu/KentPalmer See also http://kentpalmer.name

I take to be the central issue of Continental Philosophy Fundamental Ontology. So

& Edward Robinson. (reprinted.). Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.

Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2001.

17 Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. MIT Press, 2006. I

University Press, 2016.

inside2 | inside1 is outside1 | outside2

inside3 || inside2 | inside1 X outside1 | outside2

inside2 | inside1 X outside1 | outside2 || outside3

50 Ž iž ek, Slavoj. Event. London: Penguin Books, 2014

Aspectual Field and Anamorphic Entities

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