The Event of Dialectical Inversion

Abstract

This essay tries to show in which sense Žižek’s interpretation of the Hegelian dialectical inversion illuminates it as an event. To the extent that, in inversion, substance and subject only coincide with each other in their internal mismatch, it turns out that both precede each other: that the substance is always seen beforehand through the subject, but that, equally, the subject’s gaze is always limited by a blind spot that betrays the precedence of substance. For this reason, in the dialectical (dis-)encounter of opposites, the “before” and “after” of time collapses and, thus, the new can truly emerge. Finally, I explain the specificity of the subversion undertaken by the dialectical point of view: by referring the identity of any position to the self-reflective negativity of the dialectical inversion, it unmasks this identity in its ideological character and, at the same time, comprehends it as the unavoidable disguise of negation. Accordingly, it becomes apparent that dialectical thought, far from pretending to dwell on a terrain beyond antagonism and ideology, is aware of being always a committed party.