ABSTRACT
S lavoj Žižek’s engagements with life-scientifi c treatments of human mind-edness should be understood, straightforwardly enough, as fundamentally motivated by his materialist commitments. Žižekian materialism can fairly be portrayed as involving a reactivation of the German idealist ambitions of the youthful Tübingen trio of Schelling, Hölderlin and Hegel. is late-eighteenthcentury philosophical agenda, carried forward by Schelling and Hegel over the course of their subsequent intellectual itineraries, aimed at a diffi cult systematic synthesis of the apparent opposites of natural substance à la Spinoza and the transcendental subject à la Kant and Fichte (an agenda sometimes subsumed under the banner of a “Spinozism of freedom”). Needless to say, in the more than two hundred years between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-fi rst, countless philosophical, scientifi c, political, religious and other changes directly relevant to “ e Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism” (a succinct 1796 manifesto authored by either Hölderlin or Hegel) have amassed. While carefully taking these historical changes into consideration, Žižek nevertheless seeks likewise to develop a robust account of autonomous subjectivity as immanent-yet-irreducible to asubjective being as conceived of within the constraints of a strictly materialist ontology. Of course, as is common knowledge, he favours Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as an indispensable post-Hegelian resource for this eff ort to revivify the legacy of German idealism.
