LIMITS OF NEGATIVITY
The constitution of an ungrounded political subject confronts politics with a fundamental problem: how to act when no stable foundation can provide definitive orientation, yet political action still requires determination, commitment and closure. Žižek addresses this problem by locating political subjectivity in negativity, rupture and the void, showing how the collapse of established determinations can open space for radical political agency. Yet this radical opening remains shaped by a dual structure in which what cannot be positively grounded tends to appear as its negative opposite. Negativity thereby becomes the principal means through which indeterminacy is disclosed, while the relational space between opposed determinations remains insufficiently elaborated. The resulting subject is capable of breaking with established closure, but less clearly equipped to organise and evaluate what follows from that rupture without establishing a new ground. The central problem is therefore not how to eliminate negativity or restore positive foundations, but how to think and act beyond the limits of dualistic determination while preserving the productive force of negation. This requires a mode of reasoning in which indeterminacy is neither reduced to a positive determination nor dissolved into nothingness, but organised as structured indeterminacy.
The core methodological structure of his negative dialectics is defined by a particular architecture of the relation between the void and negativity. It determines the reach of his philosophy and prevents it from fully achieving the emancipatory goals it sets itself.
In The Ticklish Subject, the void appears, at its simplest, as the name for negativity. Yet he clearly distinguishes the two terms. He does not claim that the void in the symbolic order is itself a negative category. The void is addressed as a condition of constitutive lack. Negativity, by contrast, is a disruptive dialectical operation, an act of division produced through the subject’s negation. Although the two remain analytically distinct as condition and operation, he consistently elaborates the void through negative operations, implying a movement from negativity to the void: first the tearing, then the empty space it leaves behind. The void becomes the trace of a negative act; emptiness becomes evidence that something has been negated. It has no positive content of its own but becomes the persistence of negativity. Negation as denial produces emptiness as its trace through the act. Negation is negative action that opens or exposes a void (Butler, 2015). Negativity is therefore explanatorily primary; the void is secondary.
This hierarchical organisation between negativity and the void creates an explanatory asymmetry that narrows the horizon of the philosophy. If the void becomes politically intelligible as the result of negation, then political subjectivisation must be organised around the negative act. However, this reliance on negativity may itself follow from the specific logical framework through which he approaches the void, one that leaves little room for other theoretically justified possibilities.
Negativity and the void are framed through a dual relation: phenomena must appear as either positive or negative. What cannot be positively grounded will therefore necessarily appear as negative. This does not mean that negative dialectics is simply binary; it always operates in the presence of a third element, yet it nevertheless ultimately returns to an antagonistic, dual reading. He explicitly argues that dialectical processes do not unfold through a rhythm of three, but through the internal struggle of two irreconcilable opposites (2012).
Completely different frameworks for organising the void and negativity are possible. Non-dual traditions, particularly Nāgārjuna’s philosophy of the middle in Buddhism and the Kyoto School of philosophy, demonstrate that the absence of an intrinsic positive determination need not be articulated as its negative opposite. In much of continental European philosophy, the void is interpreted through negativity. This is an original position when understood in relation to its primary mission of rejecting traditional positive philosophies and positive accounts of subjectivity that represent the main pillars of already foregone Universality of European modern age.
Buddhist philosophy is distinctive in understanding the void as liberation from the urge to organise reality through opposition. It does not deny that people encounter the void through contradiction and suffering. On the contrary, suffering is often the starting point of inquiry: contradiction and suffering precede emptiness but also dissolve in it. For Buddhism, the void is therefore a non-predicative term: neither negative nor positive.
Buddhist thinkers argue that clinging to a negative view of emptiness can become a deeper trap than clinging to positive philosophy (Jinpa). Treating things as solid and certain is a correctable error; treating negativity as the ultimate principle, by contrast, undermines the very conditions that make things possible. Positivity may reify what is contingent, but negativity can dissolve the conditions for acting, relating and judging. Positivism creates a black box; negativity closes the black box into another black box instead of revealing it as what it is: a space of indeterminacy, ungroundedness.
Thus, in Buddhist philosophy, negativity is not structurally required to perform the work that Žižek needs it to perform in his outstanding emancipatory project.
Moreover, his theory of the subject is backward-looking; its horizon remains tethered to what is overcome through negation — pojasni, negativity, as core concept is determined in relation to what is surpassed and left behind. In this sense, he looks forward by looking backward. Analogously, his theory of emancipation requires reading time backwards: the cause of struggle is produced by the struggle itself, while the fantasy of lost fullness is an effect of the very antagonism it seeks to overcome. The future therefore enters the picture primarily through the destruction of the past rather than through the active construction of unprecedented forms (Roggerone).
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One reason for backward orientation is the psychoanalytic foundation of his philosophy of the subject, which relies on the retroactive interpretation of therapeutic outcomes –it seeks to transform the subject’s relation to its symptoms by retroactive explaining the constitution of psychic and symbolic structures.
Žižek’s retroactive temporal architecture is powerful because it avoids treating the past as a fixed causal origin and recognises that what something was can change through what happens later. The key contrast with Buddhist philosophy lies in how past, present and future are related. It treats past, present and future as temporally irreducible but relationally dependent — dependently arising. The past constrains the present without fully determining it, the present provides the field of actual conditions without becoming the ultimate ground of what follows, and anticipated futures can shape present action without already being given. In Žižek’s model, ungroundedness is primarily realised through the subject’s rupture with an existing determination. Under dependent arising, by contrast, the subject is ungrounded not because it breaks from a previous foundation, but because it has never existed as foundationally determined. Emancipatory action cannot be limited to rupture. The subject can also act by transforming the relations among the conditions that constitute it.
Critiquing this backward-looking orientation does not make Žižek’s negativity illegitimate. However, either negative philosophy remains local, with no licence to generalise, or it generalises into a comprehensive philosophy of the political subject, in which case it quietly becomes the kind of positive, totalising theory it defines itself against. This is the core problem facing any dualist philosophy that seeks to remain consistently negative while still claiming to know something and make generalisable claims about the world.
Žižek is aware of this problem and therefore applies various strategies for stabilising negativity. One lever is to treat the void and negativity as two distinct principles, with his elaboration oscillating between them. Yet oscillation between positions without a final synthesis is simply movement between two options; it is not the same as dialectical thinking. Genuine dialectical movement is more than mere back-and-forth: it preserves what was true in the original concept while producing something new, rather than merely restating a standoff. Nothing new is produced by the oscillatory movement, apart from vulnerability, neurosis and evasion of critique.
Another stabilisation strategy is to attach the term ‘structural’ to negativity. Once a negative relation is described as structural, it appears unavoidable — a feature belonging to the object independently of the framework through which it is elaborated. The term ‘structural’ thus produces stability within a negative philosophy committed to instability. Its use becomes a form of philosophical naturalisation of necessity, shifting an elaboration from the level of argument to the level of presumed necessity.
Equally significant, the ‘void of negativity’ fails to initiate a genuinely indeterminate situation. Indeterminacy emerges not when foundations are invalidated, but when they are instituted as ungrounded. Negativity alone is therefore incapable of preventing systemic closure — it creates a situation that is phase-locked. Although individual movements remain separate and distinct, their relationship becomes structurally synchronised and stable. Similarly, the political Left defines itself against the Right, while the Right defines itself against the Left. Each side needs the other to maintain its identity, and their antagonism reproduces both sides. There is plenty of negativity here, yet the underlying structure may remain remarkably stable: it locks into the very pattern it is supposed to destabilise.
His method thereby undermines the emancipatory promise of his philosophy, producing a gap that becomes particularly clear in the ironic parallel between his framework and his critique of Ulrich Beck’s philosophy of the reflexive production and management of risks. Beck’s theory, he argues, is “simultaneously too specific and too general” (p. 341) — too specific in its empirical claims about risk, yet too general in its ontological framing. Žižek’s philosophy reproduces an analogous condition at the methodological level. He opens too much and closes too soon: his philosophy is radical in its deconstructive opening, generating more conceptual space than its methodology is able to inhabit, yet too quick to determine what that opening ultimately means. The political Act opens a new field of possibilities, but opening a field is not the same as explaining how it can subsequently be inhabited, coordinated and evaluated. He closes before new structural principles constituted on ungroundedness can emerge.
Žižek identifies this tension as driving his project: “The key point is to assert the complementarity … of too much and not enough” (p. 219). Establishing the complementarity of excess and deficiency produces oscillation between two extremes that regulate and reproduce one another. This oscillation describes a structural rhythm that recurs throughout his theory of the subject. The subject oscillates between ecstatic and melancholic positions without ever situating the void beyond these extremes. The system oscillates, but between the same poles; it preserves the dualist framing without generating a genuinely new movement. Oscillation is a form of stasis, it does not address how openness can be made accountable, or how less exclusionary forms of closure can be achieved when the political subject is ungrounded.
The priority of negativity over negation and the void means that the political Act does not begin from an indeterminate situation. It begins from a situation already interpreted through impossibility or lack. The ‘void of negativity’ consequently cannot open onto a genuinely different relational logic: it returns to the same category — negativity — that generated the negation in the first place. This raises the question of the creative power of negation. Two forms of creativity can be distinguished. Negative creativity makes something possible by making something else impossible. Žižek is radically creative in this sense: negation disrupts an established determination and reveals that what appeared necessary was contingent or impossible. Yet if negation takes us from negativity to negativity, its creativity remains primarily disclosive; it reveals limits and opens space but does not provide a different relational architecture — a temporary stabilised interference pattern produced by multiple closures — capable of organising what becomes possible after rupture. Relational creativity, by contrast, makes something possible because previously incompatible determinations can enter into a new relation. It establishes a new way of relating ungrounded positions within a changing field of conditions. Negative creativity is, again, indispensable, but insufficient for enhancing the emancipatory capacity of the political subject.
According to the philosophy of dependent arising (Nāgārjuna), no entity or identity exists by virtue of an inherent, self-sufficient essence. The political subject also arises relationally and contingently from a shifting web of conditions. Žižek’s framework captures the first part of this insight, but immediately frames it as an active negative force. Dependent arising introduces a different form of dialectical creativity by displacing negativity from its claim to explanatory primacy within a dualist framework. The subject arises relationally from a complex web of conditions rather than through negation alone. The challenge is therefore to go beyond dictate of dualist thinking without abolishing dualist thinking: the political subject must preserve the productive force of negation while opening a relational dimension in which determinations can be recombined without becoming a new ground. This is the core topic of the next chapter: how political subject can move beyond limits of dualist thinking and develop theory of judgement under ungroundedness beyond (void of) negativity.
(Third chapter in my new paper (working title): “The Limits of Negativity: The Unfinished Project of the Political Subject”)
