Mythology, Madness, and Laughter by Gabriel Markus; Žižek Slavoj;

Author:Gabriel, Markus; Žižek, Slavoj;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

1. The Hegelian Habit

In the shift from Aristotle to Kant, to modernity with its subject as pure autonomy, the status of habit changes from organic inner rule to something mechanic, the opposite of human freedom: freedom cannot ever become habit(ual), if it becomes a habit, it is no longer true freedom (which is why Thomas Jefferson wrote that, if people are to remain free, they have to rebel against the government every couple of decades). This eventuality reaches its apogee in Christ, who is ‘the figure of a pure event, the exact opposite of the habitual.’6

Hegel provides here the immanent corrective to the Kantian modernity. As Catherine Malabou notes, Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit begins with the study of the same topic that Philosophy of Nature ends with: the soul and its functions. This redoubling provides a clue to how Hegel conceptualizes the transition from nature to spirit: ‘not as a sublation, but as a reduplication, a process through which spirit constitutes itself in and as a second nature.’7 The name for this second nature is habit. So it is not that the human animal breaks with nature through the creative explosion of spirit, which then gets ‘habituated,’ alienated, turned into a mindless habit: the reduplication of nature in ‘second nature’ is primordial, that is, it is only this reduplication that opens up the space for spiritual creativity.

Perhaps, this Hegelian notion of habit allows us to account for the cinema-figure of zombies who drag themselves slowly around in a catatonic mood, but persisting forever: are they not figures of pure habit, of habit at its most elementary, prior to the rise of intelligence (of language, consciousness, and thinking)?8 This is why a zombie par excellence is always someone whom we knew before, when he was still normally alive – the shock for a character in a zombie-movie is to recognize the former best neighbor in the creeping figure tracking him persistently. (Zombies, these properly un-canny (un-heimlich) figures are therefore to be opposed to aliens who invade the body of a terrestrial: while aliens look and act like humans, but are really foreign to human race, zombies are humans who no longer look and act like humans; while, in the case of an alien, we suddenly become aware that the one closest to us – wife, son, father – is an alien, was colonized by an alien, in the case of a zombie, the shock is that this foreign creep is someone close to us.) What this means is that at the most elementary level of our human identity, we are all zombies, and our ‘higher’ and ‘free’ human activities can only take place insofar as they are founded on the reliable functioning of our zombie-habits: being-a-zombie is a zero-level of humanity, the inhuman/mechanical core of humanity. This, of course, is Hegel’s analysis of habit. The shock of encountering a zombie is not the shock of encountering a foreign entity, but the shock of being confronted by the disavowed foundation of our own humanness.

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