Johnston, Adrian. “Ghosts of Substance Past: Schelling, Lacan and the Denaturalization of Nature ” in Lacan: The Silent Partners ed. Slavoj Žižek 2006.
… one could think of this as the exact inverse of Althusserian interpellation. Whereas, for Althusser, ‘interpellation’ designates a process wherein the positive, functional dimensions of ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (or facets of Lacan’s big Other as the symbolic order) imprint/impress themselves upon themselves upon the individual and thereby subjugate him or her – subjectivity here amounts to subjection, to anything but autonomy – this analysis now underway points to a similar yet different process, the process of ‘inverse interpellation‘, wherein the negative, dysfunctional dimensions of the big Other as the symbolic order (that is, the necessary structural incompleteness and inconsistency of this Other/order, denoted by its ‘barring’) sometimes, due to various factors, ‘hail’ the individual and thereby force him or her to (temporarily) become an autonomous subject, to be jarred out of the comfortable non-conscious habits of the automaton of quotidian individuality and plunged into an abyss of freedom devoid of the solid ground of unproblematic, taken-for-granted socio-normative directives and guarantees. When it is not plagued by snags in the threads of its fabric, the symbolic order forms an implicit backdrop, a sort of second nature, quietly yet effectively governing the flow of the individual’s life in socially and linguistically mediated reality; it tacitly steers both cognition and comportment. However, in becoming temporarily dysfunctional owing to loopholes in its programmes (that is, the inconsistencies subsisting within the structures of the symbolic order), the barred big Other’s inherent incompleteness, activated by crises or unforeseen occurrences, offers the sudden opening/opportunity for a transient transcendence qua momentary, transitory break with this Other’s deterministic nexus.
The example of Antigone highlights the link between the barring of the Symbolic and autonomous subjectivity. However. these cracks and gaps in the big Other, as the barring of the Symbolic, can he exploited as openings/opportunities for the exercise of a transcendental freedom only by an entity preconfigured with a constitution that is itself barred: namely, an entity lacking a homogeneous, unified nature whose programme would be activated automatically in instances where the big Other’s determining function breaks down (in other words, a natural fallback position, a certain default steering direction for individual action reverted to when clear socio-normative mandates are inoperative). What is required is again a barred Real: ‘human nature’ as an inconsistent and conflict-ridden corpo-Real, a libidinal economy intrinsically lacking in balanced cohesiveness and co-ordination. The transient transcendence of freedom is sparked into being when the cracks and gaps of the Real overlap with those subsisting within the Symbolic. This explosive combination of antagonisms ignites the bursting forth of exceptional subjectivity out of mundane individuality.
Another crucial difference with Kant deserves mention. Whereas Kant’s practical philosophy maintains that autonomy is an attribute or property possessed by rational beings at the level of their inalienable noumenal essence, the analysis offered here treats autonomy as an insubstantial phenomenon bound up with the faltering or failure of this essence. In other words, freedom does not arise from a special faculty with an innate capacity for autonomy hard-wired into the individual’s constitution; instead, the capacity for autonomy is a consequence of the deficient and incomplete harmonization of the various faculties forming the individual’s constitution. This represents a ‘negative’ account of human freedom – an account based on the absence, rather than the presence, of certain attributes and properties (by contrast, Kant could be said to pursue a ‘positive’ account in which a noumenal faculty for subjective autonomy is added to the otherwise overdetermined phenomenal individual). The surplus of autonomy is made possible by the deficit of heteronomy. Freedom emerges from the dysfunctioning of determinism. 49-50