Wood, Kelsey. Žižek A Reader’s Guide. Wiley/Blackwell. 2012.
Descartes’ effort to erase the entirety of reality and to start with a clean slate, … In the Ticklish Subject, Žižek showed the functional role of the Caresian cogito (“I think, therefore I exist”) within the broader project of methodic doubt and developed Lacan’s insight that the subject of psychoanalysis is none other than Descartes’ cogito.
Žižek disclosed the “empty place” of Lacanian subjectivity as a pure structural function that emerges only through a withdrawal from one’s substantial identity. This means that true subjectivity arises only through encountering the Real, and through the subsequent disintegration of the self that had been constituted within a communal universe of meaning.
In other words, as opposed to the “self” produced by the process of ideological subjectivization, the subject as such involves the hysterical questioning of the feminine subject. To summarize, The Ticklish Subject articulated and clarified Lacan’s account of subjectivity in order to assert the emancipatory potential o f the subject against capitalist ideology. 241