Malebranche and the rational core of occasionalism

00:17:52 — Malebranche and the rational core of occasionalism

Žižek rescues Malebranche’s occasionalism from its image as theological absurdity. Descartes, having split mind and matter, still looked for a point of contact; Malebranche radicalized the split by denying any causal link at all and outsourcing coordination to God. For Žižek this formalism anticipates a modern insight: the flow of ideas and the flow of material events are structurally incommensurable, and what looks like their interaction is always mediated by a third term — what Lacan calls the big Other.