Rothenberg, Molly. The Excessive Subject. Malden, M.A. : Politiy Press, 2010.
As long as we are fixated — as happens in multiculturalism and identity politics — on the symbolic identifiers of our personal identities, we obscure the link between the subject and the drive as the true engine of the subject’s existence.
Molly isn’t big on ‘subject of desire’
For when we focus on the symbolic dimension of identity, we are conceiving of the subject as a subject of desire, perpetually seeking to overcome its lack by finding its object of desire. Any political action founded on this premise dooms the actors to a futile search for a utopia which, of necessity, must always be deferred (176).
In Žižek’s view, the political meaning of one’s acts has nothing to do with one’s “sincerity or hypocrisy” — that is, one’s “subjective self-experience” is irrelevant to the objective truth of one’s actions. Rather, the subject of the drive institutes a gap between itself and its symbolic subjective dimension.
The subject’s identification with objet a re-casts it, not as a set of symbolic properties, but as connected directly to the order of objectivity. Introducing a distance towards one’s own symbolic identity puts one in a position to act in an “objective-ethical” way (OWB 182).
Presumably, it is this link to the objective that makes solidarity possible. The manifold differences or symbolic properties of individuals move to the background, while each subject, as identified with the object of the drive, finds its way to the objective order, the only terrain on which meaningful change can occur. Solidarity, then, emerges not from intersubjective relations but rather from the relations of subjects purified of their symbolic identities, subjects who meet on the ground of objectivity, as objects (177).