Slavoj Žižek's 2011 book Living in the End Times contains a 35-page interlude entitled “The Architectural Parallax.”1 Though Žižek uses the opening paragraph to belittle his own knowledge of architecture —which he describes in apparent sincerity as merely Fountainhead-level—he is clearly not just blowing smoke when discussing the subject. His chapter contains numerous examples of specific architects and buildings well beyond what most contemporary philosophers could manage. The opening and conclusion of “The Architectural Parallax” address the same topic, which unsurprisingly is also Žižek’s dominant theme. As is well known, one of his major books is on the topic of parallax, and it reappears comfortably here2 Parallax in astronomy means a case in which the apparent position of, say, the moon in comparison with the surrounding stars, seems to shift when viewed at the same time from different points on the earth, and in principle even from the same person’s left and right eye. But rather than a “Kantian” interpretation, in which some real moon-in-itself is shifted through being perceived from different subjective standpoints, Žižek offers a “Hegelian” version of parallax in which “subject and object are inherently ‘'mediated,’ so that an ‘epistemological’ shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself.” (244) In architectural terms, “things get interesting when we notice that the gap is inscribed into the ‘real’ building itself.” (244) Above all, he is fascinated by the creative opportunity the gap provides for a new third term somewhere in between the two terms of the gap itself. As he puts it, architecture “concerns not merely or primarily the actual building, but the virtual space of new possibilities opened up by the actual building.” (245) At the outset Žižek offers no definition of “virtual,” which famously means different things for different contemporary thinkers, but there are enough indications in the text to piece together some idea of what he means by it.

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What needs to be seen is how closely Žižek identifies the virtual third space he sees in architecture with the space of politics. It is a space of political utopia, engraved into the left-over spandrels of the architect’s original vision: a space where the homeless find shelters under bridges and children view (free) puppet shows in excess spaces insufficiently articulated in the building’ s original plans. Now, OOO views politics in opposite terms: as a space of uncertainty made visible by the failures of both any attempt to articulate a political truth and any attempt to eliminate political truth in favor of victorious power-plays.4 For Žižek, this would be an unacceptably “Kantian” vision of politics as concerned with elusive issues-in-themselves. Good Hegelian and Lacanian that he is, every political deadlock (like any other kind of deadlock) does not lie hidden beneath the surface of action, but is reflexively absorbed into that surface as an “immanent” deadlock derived from the failure of the two extreme terms of any parallax.