Necessity and Contingency

This reversal is homologous to the one that characterizes the Hegelian dialectics of necessity and contingency. In a first approach, it appears that their encompassing unity is necessity, i.e., that necessity itself posits and mediates contingency as the external field in which it expresses – actualizes itself – contingency itself is necessary, the result of the self-externalization and self-mediation of the notional necessity. However, it is crucial to supplement this unity with the opposite one, with contingency as the encompassing unity of itself and necessity: the very elevation of a necessity into the structuring principle of the contingent field of multiplicity is a contingent act, one can almost say: the outcome of a contingent (“open”) struggle for hegemony. This shift corresponds to the shift from S to S, from Substance to Subject. The starting point is a contingent multitude; through its self-mediation (“spontaneous self-organization”), contingency engenders – posits its immanent necessity, in the same way that Essence is the result of the self-mediation of Being. Once Essence emerges, it retroactively “posits its own presupposition,” i.e., it sublates its presuppositions into subordinated moments of its self-reproduction (Being is transubstantiated into Appearance); this positing, however, is retroactive.

Slavoj Žižek