Slavoj Žižek. Materialism, or the Inexistence of the Big Other.

Slavoj Žižek. "Materialism, or the Inexistence of the Big Other." in: in: Lacanian Ink. Vol. 29, p. 141-159, Spring 2007. Paperback, 176 pages, Language English, ISBN: 1888301260. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr. (English).

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God is here no longer the miraculous exception which guarantees the normality of the universe, the unexplainable X who enables us to explain everything else; he is, on the contrary, himself overwhelmed by the overbrimming miracle of his Creation. Upon a closer look, there is nothing normal in our universe -everything, every small thing that is, is a miraculous exception; view from a proper perspective, every normal thing is a monstrosity. Say, we should not take horses as normal and the unicorn as a miraculous exception - even a horse, the most ordinary thing in the world, is a shattering miracle. This blasphemous God is the God of modern science, since modern science is sustained precisely by such an attitude of wondering at the most obvious. In short, modern science is on the side of "believing in anything": is one of the lessons of theory of relativity and quantum physics not that modern science undermines our most elementary natural attitudes and compels us to believe (accept) the most "nonsensical" things? To clarify this conundrum, Lacan's logic of the non-All can be of some help again. Chesterton obviously relies on the "masculine" side of universality and its constitutive exception: everything obeys natural causality - with the exception of God, the central Mystery. The logic of modern science is, on the contrary, "feminine": first, it is materialist, accepting the axiom that nothing escapes natural causality which can be accounted for by rational explanation; however, the other side of this materialist axiom is that "not all is rational, obeying natural laws"-not in the sense that "there is something irrational, something that escapes rational causality," but in the sense that it is the "totality" of rational causal order itself which is inconsistent, "irrational", non-all. Only this non-All guarantees the proper opening of the scientific discourse to surprises, to the emergencies of the "unthinkable": who, in the 19th century, could have imagined things like relativity theory or quantum physics?

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