Tarrying with the Negative by Slavoj Žižek

Author:Slavoj Žižek
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In what precise sense, then, are dynamical principles "merely regulative principles, and [are] distinguished from the mathematical, which are constitutive" (CPR, B 223)? The principles of the mathematical use of categories refer to the intuited phenomenal content (to phenomenal properties of the thing); it is only the dynamical principles of synthesis which guarantee that the content of our representations refers to some objective existence, independent of the flux of perceiving consciousness. How, then, are we to explain the paradox of making objective existence dependent not on "constitutive" but on "regulative" principles? Let us return, for the last time, to the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew. Mathematical synthesis can only gather together phenomenal properties attributed to the Jew (greediness, intriguing spirit, etc.); then dynamical synthesis accomplishes the reversal by means of which this series of properties is posited as the manifestation of an inaccessible X, "Jewishness," that is to say, of something real, really existing. At work here are regulative principles, since dynamical synthesis is not limited to phenomenal features, but refers them to their underlyingunknowable substratum, to the transcendental object; in this precise sense, the existence of "Jew" as irreducible to the series of predicates, i.e., his existence as pure positing (Setzung) of the transcendental object qua substratum of phenomenal predicates, hinges on dynamical synthesis. In Lacanian terms, dynamical synthesis posits the existence of an X as the transphenomenal "hard kernel of being" beyond predicates (which is why the hatred of Jews does not concern their phenomenal properties but aims at their hidden "kernel of being")—a new proof of how "reason" is at work in the very heart of "understanding," in the most elementary positing of an object as "really existing." It is therefore deeply significant that, throughout the subdivision on the second analogy of experience, Kant consistently uses the word Objekt (designating an intelligible entity) and not Gegenstand (designating a simple phenomenal entity): the external, objective existence achieved by the synthetic use of dynamic regulative principles is "intelligible," not empirical-intuitive; i.e., it adds to the intuitive-sensible features of the object an intelligible, nonsensible X and thus makes an object out of it.

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