According to Slavoj Zizek, German idealism is characterized by the combination of two insights that appear contradictory: “(1) subject is the power of ‘spontaneous’ (i.e., autonomous, starting-in-itself, irreducible to preceding causality) synthetic activity, the force of unification, of bringing together, linking, the manifold of sensual data we are bombarded with into a unified representations of objects; (2) subject is the power of negativity, of introducing a gap/cut into the given-immediate substantial unity, the power of differentiating, of ‘abstracting,’ of tearing apart and treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity.”

To Zizek, Idealism doesn’t attempt to balance or simply link these features, but to identify them: “In order truly to understand German Idealism, it is crucial to think these two features not only together (as the two aspects of one and the same activity - like claiming that the subject first tears apart natural unity and then brings these membra disjecta together into a new, his own (‘subjective’), unity), but as stricto sensu identical: the very synthetic activity introduces a gap/difference into substantial reality, and/or the very differentiation consists in imposing a unity.”

“How, exactly,” he asks, “are we to understand this?”  Good question.

Zizek’s answer is: “The subject’s spontaneity emerges as a disturbing CUT into the substantial reality, since the unity the transcendental synthesis imposes onto the natural manifold is precisely what this word means in everyday use, not in Kant: ‘synthetic,’ artificial, ‘unnatural.’ To evoke a common political experience: all great unifiers started with a divisive gesture - de Gaulle unified the Frenchmen by way of introducing an irrreconciliable difference between those who wanted peace with Germany and those who did not recognize capitulation and wanted to go on fighting.”  That appears to mean this: The subject’s unification reality is not part of the natural world, but an “unnatural” imposition on nature.  As such, it is a “cut” into the natural world, a domination and dissection of it.  But that unnatural imposition is precisely what unifies the world, so the Idealists say.

Zizek finds the same pattern, the identity of cutting and unification, in Christianity: “we are not FIRST separated from God and THEN miraculously united with him; the point of Christianity is that the very separation unites us - it is in this separation that we are ‘like God,’ like Christ on the cross, i.e., the separation of us from God is transposed into God himself.”  And ethics: “radical act of Good HAS to appear first as ‘evil,’ as disturbing the substantial stability of traditional mores.”  Hence too the disturbing life of Jesus.