universal exception

is the idea that hegelian dialectics is not at all a final 'synthesis' of differences, but an ongoing process of continuing folding the result over on to itself, attempting to find within each universality the exception that makes it possible.

Zizek outlines the process involved in Hegelian dialectics, which is not at all a final 'synthesis' of differences, but an ongoing process of continuing to fold the result over on to itself, attempting to find within each universality the exception that makes it possible: 'each genus has only one species, the other species is the paradoxical negative of the genus itself. Just as in the instance of the 'limit case' of the logic of the signifier, the All is divided into its Part and a remainder that is not nothing but a paradoxical, impossible, contradictory entity' (77). Zizek then goes on to draw a distinction between this proper Hegelian conception and its Stalinist perversion: 'Unlike the Hegelian division, however, instead of including through its specification/determination, the genus excludes its own absence and 'negativity'' (78). But all of this needs to be read very carefully. Two points in particular are worth noting: first, that this logic of exception is only the 'limit case' of the usual logic of the universal proved through exception... second, that this 'universal exception' is to be attained only through a process of inclusion (of showing each time how the universal is only an exception) and not exclusion (of holding on to an exception from which the universal is stated). Accordingly, when Zizek says that the universal exception is the bringing-together of the universal and the exception, of directly embodying the universal in the exception, this is to be understood as a goal to be aimed at rather than something to be directly accomplished: 'Politics proper thus always involves a kind of shortcircuit between the universal and the particular... it involves the paradox of a singular that appears as a stand-in for the universal. . . This singulier universel is a group that, although without any fixed place in the social edifice . . . presents itself as the immediate embodiment of society as such, in its universality' (183-4). Zizek provides a number of examples of this universal exception throughout his work: the networks of the new virtual technologies (236)... the proletariat within Marxist theory (101-2)... the Palestinians in the West Bank and slum-dwellers across the globe (225 n. 25). However, as Zizek equally insist, each of these is also not it, their exceptional character is not some inherent property as he says, for example, of the proletariat: 'the overlapping of the Universal and the Particular in the proletariat does not stand for their immediate identity . . . : the universal revolutionary potential is rather 'inscribed into the very being of the proletariat' as its inherent radical split' (111). Nevertheless, this failure does not have the logic of the Hegelian 'bad infinity' or 'inherent transgression'. He is not simply against the American attempt to inaugurate world democracy, beginning with Iraq. Instead, his point is that the United States should be subject to the very universality it appeals to, that there is precisely no exception to this rule of democracy: 'In Hegelese, the existenceof the true Universal (as opposed to the false concrete universality of the all-encompassing global Order of Being) is that of an endless and incessantly divisive struggle... it is ultimately the division between the two notions (and material practices) of universality' (199).

universal exception, n.Definitions

universal exception