The Eclipse of Coincidence: Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Žižek's Misreading of Schelling

Author: Peter Dews · Year: 1999 (Angelaki 4:3: 15–24; republished as a book chapter) · Type: article

Dews stages a three-cornered comparison — Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Schelling — to adjudicate Žižek's Lacanian reading of Schelling's *Freedom Essay* and the Ages of the World. The thesis is corrective: Žižek misreads Schelling by reducing the ground to an "impenetrable-inert" Lacanian Real and the subject to absolute lack, thereby transforming what in Schelling are "proto-ontological wills" (strivings toward the melding of ground and existence) into "entirely discrete ontological registers." Against this, Dews argues that Schelling "can be read just as plausibly from a Merleau-Pontyan as from a Lacanian perspective" — indeed that the Freiheitsschrift is "an attempt to reconcile" the MP intuition (a pre-ontological affinity of spirit and nature) with the Lacanian intuition (the bitter reality of their non-coincidence). The discriminating hinge is the kind of non-coincidence at stake: Lacan's manque-à-être is an absolute lack with "no common ground," whereas Merleau-Ponty's *écart* is relative — "a hollow and not a hole," a disjunction between two surfaces that "by definition... cannot be absolute." Schelling's *Ungrund* supplies precisely the "common space of comparison" that Lacanian pessimism lacks. The essay is the wiki's first source on the Žižek–MP–Schelling triangulation and the secondary anchor that closes the two standing Open Questions on anarchy-in-the-ground.

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: The Lacanian subject-as-lack (manque-à-être) is an absolute lack — unfillable by any symbolic or hermeneutic shift — and this absoluteness, not any clinical discovery, is the source of Lacan's metaphysical pessimism. Because: a relative lack (the book missing from its shelf) is present-elsewhere; absolute lack posits "no common ground" between subject and signifier, so "no signifier can capture the non-essence of the subject better than any other." The structure has precedents — Kant's "synthesis as act" (B153/B161), Fichte's act-vs-being (seeing prior to all being), arguably Sartre — so it is "simply Lacan's version of the opposition between the transcendental and the empirical self." Against: a Lacanian can deny that manque-à-être is modeled on inert/objectified being; the substantialization may be Dews's, not Lacan's.

  2. Claim: Merleau-Ponty's écart is the structural alternative to Lacanian manque, and it is constitutively non-absolute. Because: "By definition, the écart cannot be absolute, for it is always a disjunction between two surfaces, one of which functions as the foil or contrast for the other, but which can in turn be relativized." The governing figure is the working note's "the nothingness... is a hollow and not a hole. The opening in the sense of a hole is Sartre, is Bergson... There is no nichtiges Nichts" — a hollow is continuous with its surface and permits no passage through to an "other side." Against: see Argument 3 — MP may not escape the very alienation he criticizes.

  3. Claim (self-objection, granted not refuted): MP's écart-ontology risks being merely "nostalgic" and unable to halt the objectifying dynamic, collapsing back into Lacanian alienation. Because: the "umbilical cord" of brute being (V&I 209) must be cut for independent existence; MP concedes wild perception "is in itself ignorance of itself" (V&I 267); "perceptual faith" in Being "cannot trump reflection" but stands "in a relation of tension with it." §II therefore ends at an impasse — which §III–IV dissolve only by routing through Schelling. Against: the vindication of MP is thus conditional on the Schelling reconciliation succeeding.

  4. Claim (central corrective): Žižek misreads Schelling — reducing the ground to inert Lacanian Real (Indivisible Remainder 20) and converting Schelling's proto-ontological "wills" into "entirely discrete ontological registers." Because: Schelling's "will of the ground" is itself doubled — it is "a will to revelation" (Über das Wesen 68): the ground wants to reveal itself, achievable only by overcoming its own resistance; the will of love, were it to "shatter the ground, it would struggle against itself... and would no longer be love" ("at odds with itself," mit sich selbst uneins). Ground and existence are in "a chiasmic, overlapping relation of cooperative opposition, of supportive antagonism," not discrete registers. To sustain "the gap that separates forever the Real of drives from its symbolization" ("The Abyss" 28), Žižek "must ignore" Schelling's stated aim of reconciling freedom and system against Jacobi's irrationalist salto mortale. Against: Žižek could rejoin that the 1809 reconciliation is exactly the "retroactive phantasy" his Lacanian reading exposes (Dews raises and resists this).

  5. Claim (triangulation): Schelling is readable "just as plausibly from a Merleau-Pontyan as from a Lacanian perspective" — the Freiheitsschrift attempts to reconcile the two. Because: the *Ungrund* is introduced as "a common space of comparison, and thus of difference, as the condition of possibility of any duality" — not the identity of ground and existence (which "would tear it apart") but the shared field "in each the whole." This is the structural reply to Lacan's "no common ground." Against: whether the Ungrund-as-shared-field reconciles or merely relocates the regress is the standing Ungrund worry (cf. editors' note 95).

  6. Claim: MP's late ontology is "a vivid phenomenological specification of Schelling's apparently abstruse speculative structure of unground, ground, and existence." Because: MP's "l'originaire éclate" — "philosophy must accompany this explosion, this non-coincidence, this differentiation" (V&I 165) — parallels the irruption of ground/existence from the Ungrund; the touching-touched ("I never reach coincidence"; coincidence "eclipsed in the very moment it occurs," 194) yields "a privative non-coincidence, a coincidence at a distance, a gap" (166); and the hiatus "is not an ontological void" (194–5). Against: the parallel is Dews's synthesis; MP never cites the unground/ground/existence triad.

  7. Claim (threat/productive balance): Schelling's ground is both productive and dangerous; MP and Žižek each over-weight one side. Because: MP appropriates erste Natur as the "barbaric principle" (La Nature 62: "wild and destructive, and yet necessary") but stresses nature's "untamed, raw, pristine character... but not its disruptive and unquenchable internal contradictions" — "a founding moment of violence or rupture in Schelling which Merleau-Ponty does not fully acknowledge." Conversely Žižek over-weights the violence and ignores the "thoroughly Merleau-Pontyan" Schelling (Ages of the World: "point of transfiguration," "overflow... playing and streaming around them," 151; and "an eternal self-negating will... without which nothing could be revealed anywhere," 140). "Schelling's fundamental philosophical struggle was to hold this complex vision of plenitude and negativity... together."

  8. Claim: Žižek's political pessimism (the unbreakable cycle of universalist "expansion" and particularist "contraction," Indivisible Remainder 27) follows from mistaking Schelling's "doubling of ourselves" for an irreparable splitting. Because: "Science... is history" (Ages of the World 113); the "doubling of ourselves... silent dialogue... is the authentic secret of the philosopher" (115), possible "only in the space of (always eclipsed) coincidence." Lose that space and doubling becomes the endless churn between opaque particularity (ground) and vacant universality (signifier) — "indistinguishable from the familiar forms of conservative Kulturkritik."

Key Findings

  • The discriminating axis between Lacanian manque and Merleau-Pontyan écart is absolute vs. relative: the écart "cannot be absolute" because it is always a relativizable disjunction between two surfaces; manque is absolute lack with no common ground. This is the wiki's sharpest articulation of why a Žižek-remainder ↔ écart equivalence fails.
  • "Hollow not hole" (V&I working note) is the MP figure that does the work: non-coincidence as a creux continuous with its surface, not a trou / nichtiges Nichts opening onto an other side. It is an independent textual warrant for the wiki's default (Toadvine/Morris/Hass) reading of the écart as binding-not-separating.
  • Žižek's reading is one-sided, not simply wrong: it correctly sees Schelling's "lack of fit" between boundless freedom and finite realization, but suppresses the reconciliatory half (will-to-revelation, Ungrund-as-shared-field, the aim against Jacobi).
  • Schelling's ground is genuinely two-faced — "plenitude and negativity... held together" — which is exactly why MP (productive-relational) and Žižek (traumatic-cut) can each derive a one-sided Schelling.
  • Dews concedes a real limitation in MP: MP imports the name "barbaric principle" but underplays Schelling's "founding moment of violence or rupture" — a counter-note to the wiki's barbarian-principle reading.

Concepts Developed

Concepts this secondary source is primary/distinctive on for the wiki:

  • ecart — the manque (absolute) vs écart (relative) distinction; "hollow not hole"; the écart "cannot be absolute" (new comparative material).
  • ungrund — the functional reading of the Ungrund as "common space of comparison" / shared field (the condition of possibility of duality).
  • ground-existence-distinction — the "will to revelation" / "supportive antagonism" reading of the wills as proto-ontological strivings, against their reduction to discrete registers.
  • Eclipse of coincidence (covered within ecart / reversibility) — coincidence as "imminent" but "eclipsed in the very moment it occurs"; the title concept.

Concepts Referenced

  • anarchy-in-the-ground — Schelling's Regellose / "indivisible remainder," here read against Žižek's Lacanian capture; the source answers this page's two Open Questions.
  • barbarian-principle / wild-being — MP's erste Natur-as-barbaric-principle (La Nature 62), with the Dews limitation (MP underplays Schelling's rupture).
  • reversibility — touching-touched, "I never reach coincidence," coincidence "eclipsed" (V&I 194).
  • specular-image / manque-à-être — Lacan's subject-as-lack; the transcendental/empirical residue.
  • Jacobi — salto mortale; the irrationalist challenge Schelling's reconciliation answers.

Key Passages

"in the case of the Lacanian subject we are confronted with the notion of an absolute lack – a lack which cannot be filled by any symbolic or hermeneutical shift of perspective. And it is this notion of absolute lack which poses the philosophical problem." (§I)

"the nothingness [néant] (or rather non-being) is a hollow and not a hole. The opening in the sense of a hole is Sartre, is Bergson... There is no nichtiges Nichts." (V&I working note, cited §II, Dews's ref 249)

"By definition, the écart cannot be absolute, for it is always a disjunction between two surfaces, one of which functions as the foil or contrast for the other, but which can in turn be relativized." (§II)

"Schelling can be read just as plausibly from a Merleau-Pontyan as from a Lacanian perspective. In fact it may turn out that Schelling's thought can be viewed as an attempt to reconcile the conflicting intuitions which we find in Merleau-Ponty and Lacan." (§III)

"there must be a common space of comparison, and thus of difference, as the condition of possibility of any duality." (§III) — the Ungrund's function

"[Žižek] transforms what in Schelling are proto-ontological 'wills' (in other words, strivings towards being, towards the melding of ground and existence) into entirely discrete ontological registers." (§III)

"the originary explodes [l'originaire éclate]... philosophy must accompany this explosion, this non-coincidence, this differentiation." (V&I, cited §IV, ref 165)

"My left hand is always on the point of touching my right hand as it is touching things, but I never reach coincidence" — coincidence "is eclipsed in the very moment it occurs [elle s'éclipse au moment de se produire]." (V&I, cited §IV, ref 194)

"There is undoubtedly a founding moment of violence or rupture in Schelling's thinking which Merleau-Ponty does not fully acknowledge." (§IV)

"Schelling's fundamental philosophical struggle was to hold this complex vision of plenitude and negativity, of essential conflict and potential reconciliation, together." (§IV)

What's Not Obvious

  1. The counterintuitive verdict is that Merleau-Ponty reads Schelling better than Žižek does — the phenomenologist of perception is closer to the German-Idealist's speculative theology of the ground than the self-declared Lacanian-Hegelian Schelling-monographer, because Žižek's Lacanian optics force the ground into an inert Real and miss its "will to revelation" (§III–IV). This inverts the expected authority ordering and is the essay's load-bearing surprise.

  2. Dews grants the strongest objection to Merleau-Ponty rather than refuting it (§II close): MP's wild perception "is in itself ignorance of itself" and his "perceptual faith... cannot trump reflection." MP is not vindicated on his own terms; he is outflanked by switching to Schelling's Ungrund. So the essay's pro-MP conclusion is strictly conditional on the Schelling reconciliation working — a dependency a quick reading misses. This connects to the wiki's ecart Positions section, where the écart's positivity is precisely what is contested (Morin) and defended (Toadvine/Morris/Hass).

  3. The whole adjudication turns on a single prefix — proto-/pre-ontological. Schelling's "wills" are proto-ontological strivings (toward the melding of ground and existence); Žižek's error is to ontologize them into "discrete registers." Remove the hyphenated proto-/pre- and the corrective collapses. The silent key is doing more work than its frequency suggests.

Critique / Limitations

  • The essay is a secondary source making a strong corrective claim about primary texts (Žižek's Indivisible Remainder and Abyss of Freedom) that are not in raw/. Dews is now a traceable secondary anchor for Žižek characterizations the wiki previously took from the Freedom Essay editors, but it remains one reader's reconstruction; a primary Žižek ingest is required before any supported promotion (General Rule 16/18).
  • Dews cites the French Le Visible et l'invisible (Gallimard 1964) pagination, not Lingis's English V&I that the wiki standardizes on. Where the wiki already homes a passage under Lingis pagination (touching-touched; the "good error"), cross-reference rather than re-paginate.
  • The key anti-Lacanian move — that the écart "by definition... cannot be absolute" — is close to stipulation. A Lacanian can rejoin that the foil/contrast structure (which makes the écart relativizable) is exactly what absolute lack suspends; Dews asserts rather than fully earns the non-absoluteness.
  • The essay's political coda (Žižek's pessimism = conservative Kulturkritik, §IV) is the weakest link in the chain — a large inference from the Schelling-misreading to a verdict on Žižek's politics that the textual argument does not fully carry.

Connections

  • contests slavoj-zizek's Lacanian reading of Schelling — the "indivisible remainder = inert Real" reading and the "discrete ontological registers" construal of the wills
  • reads friedrich-schelling from a Merleau-Pontyan angle — Schelling as the hinge readable from both MP and Lacanian perspectives; the Ungrund as "common space of comparison"
  • distinguishes ... from ... ecart and Lacan's *manque* — relative (hollow-not-hole) vs absolute (no common ground) non-coincidence; the wiki's sharpest warrant for the écart↔remainder non-equivalence
  • applies anarchy-in-the-ground against Žižek — answers the page's two Open Questions (threat-vs-productive; Žižek-remainder ↔ écart)
  • critiques barbarian-principle — MP imports the name but underplays Schelling's "founding moment of violence/rupture"
  • primary anchor for claims#zizek-remainder-vs-mp-ecart-non-equivalence (live)

Sources

This is a secondary source (a journal article republished as a book chapter). Its primary-text anchors, with Dews's own citations:

  • Schelling, Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Suhrkamp 1975) — pp. 33, 49, 52–53, 68, 99.
  • Schelling, The Ages of the World (2nd draft), trans. Norman, in The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Michigan 1997) — pp. 113, 115, 140, 151.
  • Žižek, "The Abyss of Freedom" (same volume) — pp. 28, 37, 42, 44; and The Indivisible Remainder (Verso 1996) — pp. 20, 27.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible (Gallimard 1964) — French pagination 144, 148, 165–166, 194–195, 209, 249, 254, 267; La Nature (Seuil 1996) — p. 62.
  • Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis + "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious" (Écrits: A Selection).
  • Hintikka, "Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance" (1962); Fichte–Schelling Briefwechsel; Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinoza; Dews, "The Tremor of Reflection" (The Limits of Disenchantment, Verso 1995).
  • Original publication: Angelaki 4:3 (1999): 15–24 (per note 4).