Dialectics

A lot of my work is implicitly dialectic, following on from Zizek use of Hegelian thought. However, I have not really directly mastered the basic of dialectics. As such I have read The Logic of Marxism, a text that examines the Marxist use of dialectics. This book, and have produced some brief notes;


The major difference between formal logic, which was the base form of logic from the Greeks to Hegel, and Dialectic logic lies around the laws of identity and contradiction.

In Formalism;
- A=A
- A is not non-A

The Law of Contradiction ( A is not non-A) is the basic difference between dialectics and formalism. In formal logic contradiction is purely external; A v B. The dialectic responses to identity is that A is both A and non-A. By taking A as solely A, we miss the flip side of A (non-A) (p.37).

This difference is illustrated between the original work of Laclau, where the limits of discourse are external and Zizek, where limits are strictly internal. This is a notion that Laclau latter followed. Internal v External limits is a debate that is produced in Judith Bulter, Laclau and Zizek’s collaboration Contingency, Hegemony and Universality and New Reflections on the Revolutions of our Time. Discourse theory commentator Jacob Torfing also comments productively on the issue of contradiction. Contradiction has direct relevance to the difference between excluded discourses and discourses of the symptom. As such it is an issue that I will have to engage with in my methodology section.


Hegel maintained that what is real is rational. The basic idea here is that when something becomes unreal (irrational), what is excluded by it takes over (p.87). To re-write this in a psychoanalytic manner, when the symptom, which is strictly internal to the universal identity becomes unbearable, it breaks up the universal.

It is this kind of theorising that lead Marx to believe that because capitalism had become so irrational, the working class had historical reason and right on its side (p.88). What Marx did not consider, however, was that capitalism was able to revolutionise, and has been successfully doing so since, its own symptoms. This is not to suggest that the symptom has become the universal, that it has flipped into its opposite. The effect is more subtle than that. Some symptoms, like the core of Marx’s working class have simply been exported and disavowed. Others, like environmental crisis are being particularised. Adorno, as Zizek notes in the Parallax View (p.51), describes capitalism as a system that lives on credit that with never be paid off, in the sense that it is constantly able to revolutionise its own negative conditions

Like Hegel, Marx also faced the problems of the utopian proposal of limits to the dialectic, although this is something that Homer places in doubt. Hegel contented that the dialectic had reached its ultimate synthesis in the society in which he lived. Likewise, Marx foresaw the development of a utopian socialism, beyond the dialectic.

In a dialectical fashion, I believe that dialectics has moved on from Hegelian Marxism, most productively by Zizek and others working within Post-Lacanian theory. Zizek has developed dialectics the furtherest in his newest major work The Parallax View. I will develop this in my next entry.