SOURCE: Gigante, Denise. “Toward a Notion of Critical Self-Creation: Slavoj Žižek and the ‘Vortex of Madness.’” New Literary History 29, no. 1 (winter 1998): 153-68.

In the following essay, Gigante examines Žižek's theories of identity and subjectivity, contrasting them with the critical theories of F. W. J. von Schelling.

To examine the process of critical self-creation illustrated by Slavoj Žižek, I am content to begin where he begins: with the problem of Beginning itself. As he observes in The Indivisible Remainder—a reading of F. W. J. von Schelling's unfinished masterpiece on the Creation, The Ages of the World [Die Weltalter]—it is the crucial problem of German Idealism.¹ I, however, will complicate this question of beginnings even further by asking, how is it that one gives birth to oneself as a critical subject? How does one self-create? In the case of Zizek, the critical subject never quite...