"The Supersensible is Appearance Qua Appearance"—the Basic Structure of Zizek's Dialectics

Abstract

: Slavoj Zizek's Lacanian adaptation of the Hegelian dialectics has attracted much attention in Western scholarship, and this unique dialectic is used as a fundamental research method throughout the entirety of Zizek's theoretical system. Taking the antagonistic relationship between the supersensible and appearance as a starting point, this paper transforms the epistemological opposition between the two into an ontological split, thus transforming the relationship between the two into a relationship between void and fantasy, and finally arriving at the double meanings of the proposition "the supersensible is appearance qua appearance". Accordingly, this paper proposes the quaternary structure of Zizek's dialectics, which provides a basic interpretive framework for understanding Zizek's postmodern theory.