Category: butlerEthics

Ruti, M. (2012). The Singularity of Being. Fordham University Press.

Ruti, M. (2014). The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living. Columbia University Press.

The Singularity of Being

Lacan she states focuses on repetition of trauma (RoT), contrasting this to Aristotle’s cultivation of habits consciously ,where RoT are unconscious. And the Unc and RoT are linked.

On the one hand, insofar as the unconscious retains a clandestine record of painful experiences that cannot be adequately named, let alone affectively claimed, it crystallizes around trauma. On the other, it is exactly those affects that remain unconscious that persistently return in the form of traumatic repetitions. (p. 14)

They, the RoT, build up upon one another forming a “psychic landscape” and a “highly personalized tapestry of pain.”

In a way, nothing distinguishes one subject from another more decisively than the particularity of its approach to suffering. Trauma, as it were, resides at the root of the subject’s distinctive and more or less inimitable character—what I have in this book chosen to call “the singularity of being.” (p. 14)

Repetition Compulsion as an Articulation of Unconscious Desire

Ruti then brings us to the train analogy. Stays on rigid tracks, can’t turn around, has a designated destination, even if its reached it a thousand times before, or if the destination keeps receding indefinitely. “To derail it would be immensely destructive.” (p. 14)

These stations, which house the subject’s most symptomatic fixations, are likely to carry names such as Anxiety, Depression, Disenchantment, Weariness, Sorrow, Bitterness, and Misery. If the train consistently stops at them, it is because something in their vicinity remains unresolved or unprocessed. (p.15)

The RoT or repetition compulsion brings us to these stations over and over again. “The repetition compulsion translates desire into a mechanical, fully automatic force that eludes our efforts to redirect it.”

“In a way, the repetition compulsion (as a way of binding desire) is one of the basic supports of our being, which is why we cling to it, why, when all is said and done, we tend to “love” our symptoms more than we love ourselves (to paraphrase Žižek).”(p. 15)

No matter how disorienting the “life-orientation” that the repetition compulsion offers us, having this orientation is more reassuring than not having it, for the latter would mean that we would need to actively rethink our entire existential approach. We would no longer be able to count on the inevitability, or at least the high probability, of certain outcomes, but would, rather, need to face the abyss of utter unpredictability. This is why many of us keep choosing the “substance” of our symptoms over the “nothingness” of their absence. (p. 15)

The sheer reliability of the repetition compulsion is an immensely effective defense against the explosive intensity of jouissance. Paradoxically enough, even when our desire takes us in pathological directions, it protects us by barring our access to the kind of unmediated enjoyment that we would experience as unbearable.

On this view, while the “destiny” that the repetition compulsion offers us is a trap, it is at the same time also a protective shield without which our lives would be much more difficult to handle.

But how exactly does the “stain” of jouissance translate to the infinite? Surely this is not merely a matter of a persistent undeadness that does not let us rest. If we stay on this level, the idea of infinitude remains metaphoric at best, indicating merely that within our finite being there are energies that gesture towards the infinite. It may, then, help to reiterate the matter as follows: It is only insofar as jouissance precludes self closure that we long for the infinite; the fact that jouissance parasitizes our symbolic constitution, that it generates a rift (or a series of rifts) within our social intelligibility, arouses “immortal” yearnings. In other words, it is our gnawing sense of being somehow less than fully self-realized, of lacking “resolution,” as it were, that makes us reach for the transcendent.

The RoT or repetition compulsion gives structure to the subject’s jouissance so that the latter becomes more manageable.

It translates the amorphous (or polymorphously perverse) pressure of jouissance into the relatively stable “organization” of desire, thereby transforming the uncontrollable urgency of the drives to the more mediated discomfort of symptomatic fixations. Without this organizational consistency of desire, we would be compelled to ride the wave of bodily jouissance in ways that would keep us forever caught at the junction of excessive pleasure and excessive pain. (p. 16)

Desire, so to speak, gains its “fullness” (robustness, vitality) from its proximity to the drive.[ ] Desires that remain faithful to the Thing—and that therefore automatically intertwine with the drive’s trajectory—attach themselves to objects that in one way or another evoke the Thing. (18)

Even though desire is always obligated to approach the Thing obliquely, through the tangible objects it stumbles upon in the world, some of these objects come closer than others to capturing the unique aura of the Thing. Those closest to this aura are also the ones closest to the drive (and thus capable of animating not only desire but also the drive).

Drive Desire Thing

The drive and desire therefore want to the same Thing. But the drive is closer to the Thing than desire can ever be because the drive conveys the pulse of the bodily real, whereas desire, while obviously still connected to the body, is a function of the signifier and, as such, twice removed from the Thing.

This should not be taken to mean that the drive can be equated with some sort of an “inborn” instinct for, far from expressing the “natural” rhythm of the body, its relentlessness—not to mention its deadly aspect—wars against the most basic needs of the body, forcing the body into a state of over-agitation and excess stimulation even when it seeks rest and equilibrium. (18)

the (always rather nebulous) distinction between the drive and desire is not one of nature versus culture, but merely of relative nearness to the Thing.

This implies that even the most entrenched kernel of the subject’s being (the drives that define the trajectory of its jouissance) is partially “disciplined,” linked to the historically specific desire of the Other, and therefore entirely incongruous with any notion of intrinsic humanness.

Despite our culture’s obsessive eff orts to naturalize the drive by, for instance, hypothesizing (usually maddeningly stereotypical and reductive) distinctions between male and female sexuality, the drive is always somewhat sociohistorical. This, in turn, suggests that a different sociohistorical context would provide an opening for different configurations of the drive. (19)

This unattainability of unadulterated jouissance is what makes social life possible, for as enthralling as the elusive Thing may be, it is—like the Kantian sublime to which it bears a close conceptual relationship—also terrifying, overwhelming, and potentially devouring.

The task of desire, then, is to keep us at a reassuring distance from the Thing while at the same time allowing us to fantasize about attaining it. Fantasy, through desire, usurps the place of jouissance. This is why Lacan claims that “desire is a defense, a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance” (1966, 699).

To the degree that jouissance overagitates us, preventing us from living within (the relatively harmonious) purview of the pleasure principle, we are forever attempting to purge ourselves of it even as we tirelessly aim for it. (p. 19)

desire is a defense, a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance

Indeed, insofar as the Other generates a fantasy of jouissance as a lost state that we might one day recuperate, it protects us from the disillusioning realization that jouissance is antithetical to subjectivity not so much because we have been unfairly deprived of it, but because we are inherently incapable of managing it. This does not mean that we should meekly submit to the normative dictates of the Other without any attempt to resist or reconfigure their hegemonic dimensions. But it does clarify what Lacan means when he states that the drive is a “fundamental ontological notion” connected to “a crisis of consciousness” (Lacan, 1960, 127).

If Freud’s analysis of the unconscious already shook the foundations of the rational subject of (Cartesian) consciousness, the realization that we are constitutionally incapable of coping with the force of our drives adds yet another layer of deep ontological vulnerability to human existence. (p. 20)

It is true that, in the Lacanian universe, the sacrifice of jouissance to the signifier is what causes the subject’s lack-in-being — what brings into existence the (barred) subject as a site of pure negativity. Nevertheless, what is ultimately the bigger calamity is that the dissection or dismemberment of the real by the signifier can never be fully accomplished. The remaining traces, scraps, residues, or leftovers of jouissance continue to destabilize the subject, threatening to dismantle it from within even as they simultaneously animate and support its embodied existence. This, I would concede, is an existential “crisis” of potentially formidable proportions. (20)

If desire results from the foundational lack caused by the signifier, the drives persist as a surplus of enjoyment that continues to bubble up into the symbolic, allowing remnants of the real to seep into the domain of signification and sociality in a highly explosive manner. As both Žižek and Zupančič have pointed out, the trouble with jouissance is less that we cannot attain it than that we cannot free ourselves of its excess. (20)

The “Undeadness” of the Drives Undoubtedly our lives would be less complicated if we could figure out how to manage the excess jouissance of the drives. Yet my analysis thus far also suggests that our singularity is inextricably aligned with this excess — that our constitutive instability is merely the flipside of the fact that we are never completely absorbed by symbolic and imaginary processes of subjectivization.

This is why it would be a mistake to confuse singularity with our usual understanding of personality. Even though there are conceptual linkages between the model of singularity I am developing and our intuitive sense of what it means to possess a distinctive individuality, disposition, or temperament, Lacanian singularity cannot be equated with what we typically refer to as a given individual’s “personality.”

If we choose to envision singularity as a function of the real, we must admit that it is more likely to transmit sudden flashes of eccentricity and idiosyncrasy than to support the performative play of masks that comprises personality in its conventional sense.

To the extent that singularity communicates something about the indelible imprint of the real — that it articulates the “fragmented and panic-stricken” agitation of the drive — it by necessity relates to what is aberrant and socially anomalous about the subject.

Singularity thus relates to those parts of the drive that manage to ooze through the sieve of the various systems of organization that are designed to stabilize human life. These parts are, as it were, the “inhuman” (not fully socialized) element that chafes against the “reasonable” façade of subjectivity and personality, lending the subject’s character an uncanny “monstrousness” beyond its symbolic and imaginary mandates. (21)

our singularity is inextricably aligned with this excess — that our constitutive instability is merely the flipside of the fact that we are never completely absorbed by symbolic and imaginary processes of subjectivization.

Posthumanist theory routinely insists that the human subject can never be fully present to itself—that self-alienation or self-noncoincidence is an inherent component of subjectivity. However, a Lacanian understanding of what it means to reach the real offers us a posthumanist way of conceiving how it might be possible for us to experience an immediacy of being and to achieve an (always transitory) taste of self-presence. This is not a matter of attaining some sort of an essential core of being. Quite the contrary, the transcendent encounters I have been depicting extend the posthumanist critique of the essential self by revealing that the subject can only approach its singularity when it finds itself on the brink of utter disintegration.

In other words, they put the consistency of the self in question even more radically than do deconstructive theories of signification, for they transport us to nonlinguistic realms that liquefy the coherence of subjectivity even more effectively than the polyvalence and slipperiness of language.

In fact, it is exactly because they neutralize our usual processes of symbolization that they feel so viscerally “real” to us: Our powers of representation falter in the face of such episodes, so that we, quite simply, do not have the words to describe them. The best works of art, literature, and other cultural production may manage to convey something of their enchantment. Yet, ultimately, transcendent encounters repel or defeat the power of language as a social glue. They cannot ever be entirely incorporated into our symbolic universe. But this does not mean that they do not happen. Or that they lack reality. They may in fact be the most “real” thing we ever experience. (27)

Subject of Desire, Subject of the Drive

The subject of desire is the one who stuff s one object (objet a) after another into the lack within its being, only to discover that no object can fully make up for the loss of the Thing. The subject of the drive, in contrast, is a subject of uncontrollable jouissance, which is why its emergence results in the undoing of the culturally viable individual.

… If the subject of desire thrives on the postponement of satisfaction, the drive has no patience with deferral: It aims directly at the sublime Thing. As a result, even though neither the subject of desire nor the subject of the drive attains complete satisfaction, the subject of the drive—the “headless” subject of jouissance—comes closer to it: It grazes the nub of unmitigated bliss that the subject of desire can only circle from a distance. Yet because the drive is always, ultimately, the death drive, the closer the subject comes to full satisfaction, the closer it also comes to utter destruction. This nexus of satisfaction and self-annihilation has led critics such as Žižek and Lee Edelman to valorize the act of subjective destitution—the subject’s suicidal plunge into the unmediated jouissance of the real—as a liberatory act that, finally, grants the subject some “real” satisfaction. (60)

Edelman goes on to explain that because the sinthome cannot be substituted for any other signifier, because it “accedes to no equivalent, to no translation, and thus to no meaning,” it functions as a locus of idiosyncrasy that captures the individual’s singularity “as definitively, and as meaninglessly, as a fingerprint” (36).1 On this account, singularity emerges at the very place where meaning is refused—where social identity and intelligibility disintegrate. (61)

a site of mindless enjoyment — a node of senseless compulsion on which the subject’s singularity depends

If the sinthome represents a surge of singularity beyond the social, then the final Lacan is more interested in the subject’s capacity to access this singularity than in its ability to navigate its existential predicament of constitutive lack.

Indeed, if one of the principal lessons of Lacan’s early thought was that it is only when the subject acquaints itself with the current of its desire that it gains some agency over its life, the lesson of his later thought was more radical in that he came to connect singularity to jouissance and to advocate identification with the sinthome as a means of sidestepping the dominant economy of the symbolic order. (62)

Lacan, in other words, transitioned from theorizing the conditions under which the subject can recognize the “truth” of its desire to trying to understand the conditions under which it can forgo desire (which, even at its most counterhegemonic, is always indebted to the Other) for the sake of the drive (which represents a site of singularity that is deeply antithetical to the Other).

his later work interrogates the real as what has the potential to transport the subject beyond the reach of the Other by causing a categorical break with its injunctions.

The act represents an unfaltering refusal of the symbolic complex of meaning that legitimates the subject as a member of a given cultural fabric; simply put, the act asks the subject to relinquish all of its normative supports by hurling itself into the abyss of the real. (65)

Yet what often gets lost in post-Lacanian accounts of the act, and sometimes even in Žižek’s own work, is the fact that although Lacan certainly describes the act as a suicidal, destructive encounter with the death drive whereby the subject explicitly goes against its own well-being—whereby the subject sacrifices not only its social position but also the promises of its future—he also links the death drive to a will “to make a fresh start,” “a will to create from zero, a will to begin again”.

the act of self-negation that erases the subject is simultaneously a basis of a fresh form of subjectivity, not in the sense of serving as a prelude to some sort of a reassuring recentering of identity, but in the sense of instigating a sweeping realignment of priorities. (69)

Antigone’s desire is obviously not the desire of the Other, and she insists on following this desire to its bitter end. Yet the flipside of her self-destructiveness is a paradoxical kind of freedom—a singularity of being that does not let anyone else dictate the course of her desire. As Lacan states, Antigone “affirms the advent of the absolute individual with the phrase, ‘That’s how it is because that’s how it is’” (71)

Not ceding on one’s desire

Antigone is a heroine because she does not give ground relative to her desire, but rather pursues this desire beyond social limits, to “a place where she feels herself to be unassailable”

While most human beings situate themselves within a network of conventional signifiers, within what Lacan calls the “morality of the master” (315), the hero as a singular creature attaches herself to “the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man” (279).

This “break” (the hole in the symbolic through which jouissance gushes into the realm of sociality) is, of course, where the Thing appears as lost so that what distinguishes the hero from her less noble compatriots is her willingness to directly confront the lack (or “nothingness”) at the heart of her “being.”

In addition, while the ordinary subject tends to capitulate its desire in the face of external pressure, the hero pursues the track of this desire (the track that, as we have learned, situates her in a particular “destiny”) to its conclusion regardless of the price. The hero knows as well as the rest of us that insisting on her desire is “not a bed of roses,” yet she is willing to meet her fear head-on in order to accomplish this task. In Lacan’s words, “the voice of the hero trembles before nothing”

But how is it that we have, once again, transitioned from the drive energies
of the real to desire? Why is it that every time we try to talk about the subject of the drive, we end up back at the subject of desire?

what sets the drive apart from desire is its closer proximity to the Thing, then the subject who pursues its desire to its outmost limit by necessity catches up with the drive (ultimately, the death drive). This is why the act of subjective destitution is the logical outcome of not ceding on one’s desire.

We have discovered that, under normal circumstances, desire serves as a defense against unmanageable jouissance: The incessant circling of desire around the lost Thing shields the subject from the Thing’s more devouring aspects. Against this backdrop, the subject who undertakes an act of subjective destitution—as Antigone does—allows its desire to meet the arc of its jouissance; it allows its desire to aim directly at the fundamental fantasy. Such desire, like the mechanical pulsation of the drive that it expresses, causes the subject to “persevere” in its goal regardless of external demands to relinquish it. (73)

Will I act in conformity to what threw me out of joint?

If the service of goods” valorizes utilitarian aspirations over the specificity of the subject’s desire, Lacanian ethics asks, “Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you” Zupančič spins this statement as follows: “will I act in conformity to what threw me ‘out of joint’, will I be ready to reformulate what has hitherto been the foundation of my existence?

As Zupančič explains, “it is only after this choice that the subject is a subject”. “It is at this level,” she specifies, “that we must situate the ethical subject: at the level of something which becomes what ‘it is’ only in the act”

Ethical betrayal, in this context, equals social compliance.

Lacan in fact ridicules both the Aristotelian path of moderation and the Kantian notion that ethics must be “disinterested,” divorced from any idiosyncratic passions. Regarding the latter, he posits that the categorical imperative (“Act in such a way that the maxim of your action may be accepted as a universal maxim”), in today’s docile society, implies that you should never act “except in such a way that your action may be programmed” (1960, 76–77). That is, the categorical imperative dictates that you should only do what the mainstream morality of the Other has conditioned you to do.

Ethics, Copjec concludes, is “a matter of personal conversion, of the subjective necessity of going beyond oneself ”

As Joan Copjec elaborates, “The ethics of psychoanalysis is concerned not with the other, as is the case with so much of the contemporary work on ethics, but rather with the subject, who metamorphoses herself at the moment of encounter with the real of an unexpected event.” Ethics, Copjec concludes, is “a matter of personal conversion, of the subjective necessity of going beyond oneself ” (76)

These are situations where the subject of desire yields to the subject of the drive because the repetition of the same old pattern is no longer a feasible option, because the aggravation of always wanting what one cannot have (say, social justice) becomes so overwhelming that the only “reasonable” response is to rupture the endless cycle of desire and disappointment by reaching for direct (rather than socially mediated) satisfaction; these are situations where one more spin on the wheel of desire is so intolerable that the subject would rather destroy itself or its social environment than endure it. (78)

Lacanian analysis reveals that we are rarely the entirely helpless victims of our “destiny”—that the “truth” of our desire functions as an entryway to resistance—the act merely takes the attitude of not ceding on our desire to its absolute limit. (82)

If analysis relies on the signifier to reconfigure our destiny, the act (usually temporarily) ushers us beyond signification—to a place that demolishes the quilting points that customarily hold together our symbolic universe. The hope, here, is that out of the ashes of this destructiveness rises a new private or collective set of possibilities. Clearly, neither of these approaches is perfect. But both have the potential to ensure that what seems “impossible” from the point of view of the normative symbolic, however fleetingly, becomes possible.

it is only as singular creatures that we can attain “real” satisfaction—that we can develop an identity that is not entirely subsumed to the rules of social conventionality.

This is why I have tried to illustrate that if we are to engage in embarrassing displays of surplus ardor, it is better that this ardor be directed at the “truth” of our desire than at social sites of authority that seek to secure our loyalty by convincing us that, really, what we should desire is what the Other desires us to desire.

For Badiou, there is no abstract subject who exists prior to the event, but only an always particular creature, particular body, particular “some-one,” who is summoned by an extraordinary event to become a subject, to become a quasi-transcendent being driven by the fire of its commitment to the truth it has discovered. (85)

the event interpellates the subject beyond its usual ideological interpellations, beyond its usual symbolic investments, so as to make room for its singularity.

It converts a replaceable individual—an individual who, in Levinas’s terms, is a (classifiable) part of a whole—into an irreplaceable subject of truth.

To be precise, it enables the “some-one” to attain the complex status of a “universal singular,” of a subject who is at once “singular” (in the sense of being unique and inimitable) and “universal” (in the sense of being traversed by a truth that is applicable to everyone without exception).

The subject, in this sense, is a specific instance of a universal truth. Furthermore, although subjecthood is not something that everyone attains, the position of the subject is one that could in principle be inhabited by anyone; insofar as the event articulates a thoroughly generic truth, it engenders a subject whose irreplaceability consists of the fact that it is endlessly replaceable.

Peter Hallward explains the matter as follows: As far as its subjects are concerned, access to truth is . . . identical to the practice of freedom pure and simple. Ordinary individuals are constrained and justified by relations of hierarchy, obligation, and deference; their existence is literally bound to their social places. True subjects, by contrast, are first and foremost free of relations as such, and are justified by nothing other than the integrity of their own affirmations. Pure subjective freedom is founded quite literally on the absence of relation, which is to say that it is founded on nothing at all. (89)

In Badiou’s terms, Antigone’s decision to disobey Creon is what turns her from a mortal creature to an immortal one. Her defiance is an act of freedom in that it liberates her from all bonds to the sociopolitical establishment.

Such an eff ort to convert the void into a nameable community inevitably ends in totalitarianism. Because the void is, as Badiou puts it, “the place of an absence, or a naked place, the mere taking place of a place” (quoted in Hallward 2003, 263), any attempt to “fill” it by definitive content—to transform the singular burst of the event into something “repeatable”—cannot but lead to a dangerous totalization. (99)

Žižek regards the real as some sort of a positive, extrasymbolic excess that attacks the symbolic from the outside, for he repeatedly stresses that the real is internal to the symbolic: the “bone in the throat” or “immanent crack” that prevents the closure of the symbolic. Žižek remains devoted to the trope of a rebellious real that cannot be reconciled with symbolic reality. In contrast, Badiou, as I have shown, has developed the idea that the real (or the void that generates the truth-event) can be named and (to a limited extent) rewoven into the fabric of the symbolic.

Though I agree that the emphasis on the real can be an effective means to question the ideologically complacent edifice of the symbolic, I would insist that taking up permanent residency in the real is hardly a feasible option. Peering into the abyss, remaining aware of lack, tarrying with the negative, and even temporary destructiveness as a springboard to something constructive all make sense to me. But the idea of the real as an alternative to symbolic subjectivity simply does not. What would the plunge into the real achieve in tangible terms? What would it mean to “step out of the symbolic” altogether? (108)

Žižek does not entirely appreciate the full implications of his own contention that the most radical aspect of Lacanian theory is the recognition that the real renders the symbolic unreliable. As he explains with regard to the signifier, “As soon as the field of the signifier is penetrated by enjoyment it becomes inconsistent, porous, perforated—the enjoyment is what cannot be symbolized, its presence in the field of the signifier can be detected only through the holes and inconsistencies of this field” (Sublime Object 1989, 122).

Fair enough. But why not take the next logical step of conceding that the structural impossibility of symbolic closure is precisely what makes the play of (re)signification possible? (114)

Why not take the next logical step of conceding that the structural impossibility of symbolic closure is precisely what makes the play of (re)signification possible?

As a consequence, one does not always need to exit the symbolic in a grand gesture of subjective destitution (or divine violence) in order to activate the subversive potentialities of the real. One merely needs to mobilize the “overabundance” of the signifier. (115)

Joyce’s Sinthome

And we also have learned that Lacan came to think that the aim of analysis was to allow the subject to identify with its sinthome, for doing so made it possible for it to disconnect itself from the desire of the Other. Most importantly, we have learned that the sinthome resides beyond the reach of the signifier, which is why it does not respond to analytic treatment, but can only be “assumed” as the symptomatic kernel of one’s being.

Even though—as Žižek stresses—Lacan connects the sinthome to the death drive, he does not invariably regard identification with the sinthome as a matter of subjective destitution (or divine violence). In the case of Joyce, such an identification is a means of linking the symbolic and the real so as to generate fresh forms of signification

Without question, the insurrection of the real within the symbolic in Joyce’s writing conveys the destructive force of the death drive. Joyce dissolves meaning. He undoes—destroys, dismembers, and massacres—language. (117)

Joyce demonstrates that even though the real as such cannot be written, one can write in such a way as to brush against it; one’s signifiers can transmit energizing scraps of the real.

Yet if we allow for the possibility that the signifier does not invariably obey the dictates of the big Other, and that the unruly energies of the real can regenerate, rather than merely weaken, the symbolic, it becomes apparent that the signifier is not always an instrument of ideological interpellation. While it is obvious that we are often confronted by dead signifiers—signifiers that contain no trace of the real—language is by definition as much a locus of creative potential as it is of hegemonic power.

The sinthome, in short, makes polyvalent meaning possible. Even though it itself is not in the least bit concerned with the various meanings generated, it functions as a locus of enjoyment-in-meaning, enjoyment in the proliferation of meaning. (119)

Lacan thus proposes that each of us has some leeway in organizing the signifiers of the big Other. That is, we can assert our singularity not only by exchanging the symbolic for the real, but also by bringing the real into the symbolic. This is exactly what Joyce does, and it is his ability to do so that leads Lacan to characterize him as a wholly singular individual.

Lacan’s reading of Joyce implies that the “immortality” (the agitation or “undeadness”) of the real can be transformed into symbolically viable modalities of vitality; the excess (“too muchness”) of the drives can become the basis for the excess (“overabundance”) of meaning. In this sense, pioneering forms of meaning production are a way to infuse the “dead” signifier with the “undead” energies of the drive so as to keep the symbolic moving forward. This gives us yet another rendering of how what is “impossible” (jouissance) becomes the foundation of the possible (innovation). (123)

When our discourse fails to transmit the real (when it is separated from the sinthome), it obeys the master’s dominant law (thereby remaining unoriginal). Discourse that communicates the real, in contrast, crafts what I have been calling a “character.” Singularity, in this sense, is a matter of creative living, of the always-idiosyncratic ways in which we manage to activate the energies of the real within the symbolic. (124)

The sublimations of Galileo and Mary Wollstonecraft (to choose two obvious examples) were not accepted as legitimate by their social settings. But in the larger scheme of history they turned out to be exceptionally important. This is the luminous face of sublimation—the face that confirms that our failure to attain the Thing can stimulate tremendous feats of originality. (139)

Unfortunately, to the degree that the Other seeks to hide its lack by offering us a dizzying cornucopia of unnecessary objects, our life-worlds are filled with such decoys, with distractions calculated to steer our attention away from social problems to the problem of deciding which shade of lipstick, scent of aftershave, size of television screen, or box of breakfast cereal will most satisfy us.

From waste dumps to weapons of mass destruction, our world is filled with harmful objects that, in an increasingly symptomatic manner, represent the residue of human endeavors to compensate for the lost Thing—to fill the lack that founds human “being.”

As a race, we are on the brink of devastating our environment because we are overloading it by our desperate attempts to fend off the specter of nothingness.

This is why we have a pressing ethical obligation to pay attention to the difference between objects that contain an echo of the Thing and the various lures that drown out this echo. Arguably, many of our most burning environmental problems are due to the fact that we sometimes confuse the two, with the consequence that our relationship to the world is driven by sheer gluttony rather than the quest for new forms of resourcefulness. (141)

I want to be careful here to resist the temptation to demonize our symbolic universe in its entirety, for I do not think that the lures of consumer society even begin to exhaust its domain. Concluding that there is nothing worth venerating in our culture would only lead us back to the idea that the only way to assert our singularity is to relinquish all of our symbolic supports in an act of subjective destitution (or divine violence).

Most of us have cultural reference points that connect us to something more constructive than the distractions of consumerism—that provide the kinds of meaningful ideals and values that anchor us in the collective world even as we endeavor to define our singular place within that world. (142)

The fact that we are connected to specific signifieds does not mean that there is no room left for the playfulness of the signifier; it does not mean that the link between signifieds and signifiers cannot be severed and reconfigured. This severing may not always be easy, but it is entirely possible, as is proven not only by Joyce, but also by artists, intellectuals, politicians, and social activists (among others) who manage to revamp our cultural ideals and values from year to year, from decade to decade, so that someone from the nineteenth century would have a hard time fitting into our current cultural configuration.

And we also know that some circuits of desire are more “truthful” than others precisely because they are directed at objects that, however ineffably, possess this power. One might even hypothesize that those of us who are able to find objects that convey something about the Thing’s aura activate the “immortal” within ourselves better than those who live entirely on the level of empty (counterfeit) objects. (146)

Although Lacan certainly criticizes the corrupt nature of much of what our society sells as “enjoyment,” he does not ask us to shun material things in favor of some sublime ideal that will never crystallize (or even in favor of a radical act that will detach us from the world). Quite the opposite, he intimates that the various things (objects and representations) of the world are how “real” satisfaction makes its way into our lives.

Zupančič thus suggests that if we are to avoid the kind of nihilism that renders the world meaningless, we must recognize that the Thing can only be approached through things. She calls this phenomenon “desublimation” because it makes the sublime accessible within the semblances of the world (2003, 180–81).

But there may not actually be any need for a new term, given that, as I have demonstrated, Lacan’s theory of sublimation is designed to communicate this very idea, namely that the sublime enters the world through ordinary objects and representations. Ideally, this results in an enhanced capacity to fi nd value in the minutiae of everyday life. And it illustrates how drastically Lacan’s existential ethos—if I may call it that—differs from philosophies that place satisfaction beyond the world, in some ultimate moral or divine Good, for instance. In the Lacanian vision, instead of looking for satisfaction in Platonic ideals, the Christian afterlife, or any other transcendent domain, we aspire to discover it in the here and now of our existence.

what it means to persist in one’s desire. According to the latter, ethics is not a matter of seeing one’s desire to its destructive climax, but rather of keeping desire alive by refusing to close the gap between the Thing and things. By now we know that there are (at least) two ways to “access” the real: While the act aims directly at it, sublimation takes the more subtle approach of looking for the echo of the Thing in ordinary objects and representations. Both have to do with the quest for satisfaction, but while the jouissance of the act neutralizes the symbolic, sublimation aspires to reconfigure it by bringing bits of jouissance into the realm of signification.

Lacanian ethics asks us to revere the utter singularity of our relationship to the Thing even when it would be easier to capitulate to the desire of the Other.

It may in fact be that the act and sublimation are merely two different points of resistance on a continuum that runs from antisocial rebellion to meek social conformity, so that honoring the echo of the Thing through sublimatory efforts to reinvent social ideals and values is merely a less drastic (or desperate) manifestation of ethical action than the act is. Perhaps we are simply dealing with two faces of the attempt to ensure that what the cultural order considers “impossible” somehow becomes possible. (149)

Sublimation is a matter of ethics “insofar as it is not entirely
subordinated to the reality principle, but liberates or creates a space from which it is possible to attribute certain values to something other than the recognized and established ‘common good

The object that comes the closest (or remains the most loyal) to the Thing is, ethically speaking, more important than one that is merely useful. Once again, this does not mean that we have the right to expect the objects of our desire to capture the Thing’s aura with complete precision. But it does suggest that objects that most powerfully emit this aura are also the ones that most readily engage our passion.

Badiou’s fidelity to the event is nothing other than fidelity to the echo of the Thing; it is nothing other than an attempt to ensure that reality is never just reality—that there is room in human life for the “undead” (or transcendent) energies of the real. Badiou’s notion of naming the event, in turn, is one way to understand how the echo of the Thing finds its way into symbolic formations. (153)

nothing on the level of everyday reality matters, that the world is composed of mere semblances, and that we should consequently aim directly at the real. This attitude strives to separate all symbolic formations from the real and to assert that the real is the only thing that matters. Those who uphold this view rail against the notion that there could be anything in the world that is capable of giving us a little slice of the Thing (that has the power to grant us any “real” satisfaction). Zupančič characterizes this approach as a zealous “passion for the Real” that demands an end to all ideological configurations—all semblances—as a distraction from the real Thing.

It could be claimed to underlie Žižek’s contention that the big Other is nothing but a set of ideological deceptions designed to cover over and pacify the monstrous real. It fails to acknowledge that it is only through symbolic formations (semblances and even ideologies) that the real materializes as something tangible.

I have conceded that many of these materializations remain “empty.” And undeniably there are others that are deeply hegemonic. But, as I have stressed, there are also those that carry the “immortal” passion of the real into the domain of symbolization in highly transformative ways. That is, even if symbolic formations are “mere” semblances and ideologies, some of them convey “real” commitment; they communicate the kind of absolute dedication that Badiou’s event also calls for, thereby feeding our sublimatory efforts to turn the world into a less insipid place. (154)

If the beauty of sublimation consists of its power to conjure up new ideals by raising objects (and representations) to the dignity of the Thing, the decline of our ability to sublimate implies that we become more and more tightly enslaved to already existing ideals; we lose the ability to envision viable alternatives to the ideologies that govern our world—that, as it were, constitute the “reality” of our reality principle.

Although Butler specifies that being “dispossessed” by the Other (or by an array of others) does not necessarily mean that we are treated badly, but merely that we are “acted upon” by forces we cannot control, it is difficult to shake the impression that she advances an unnecessarily disempowered theory of what it means to come into being and persist as a human subject.

As fiercely as Butler and Žižek have, over the years, disagreed, they arguably
suffer from the same blind spot, namely the inability to appreciate the various ways in which we are the beneficiaries of the Other’s discourse. In Žižek’s case—as I have stressed—this blind spot leads to an overvalorization of the ethical/divine act. In Butler’s, it tends to generate a masochistic discourse of irremediable deprivation. (158)

Furthermore, because of the Derridean “overabundance” of the signifier, our acts of meaning production can be renewed indefinitely so that there are, in principle, no limits to the human capacity to fashion new meanings.

Žižek himself acknowledges, whenever the symbolic gains too much power at the expense of the real, our existence loses its passion and forward-moving cadence. But when the symbolic fails to adequately mediate the disorderly energies of the real—when the quilting points that connect us to social sites of meaning are too fragile—we feel terrorized by the overproximity of jouissance; we fail to gain a steady foothold in cultural narratives and other collective landmarks that would be able to anchor us in the symbolic world.

Intensely creative states — the kinds of states that overtake our symbolic persona and transport us into an alternative existential plane—are ones of heightened singularity because they allow jouissance to temporarily overshadow the more socially mediated texture of desire.

Such states are moments when the echo of the Thing reverberates within the symbolic with unusual passion. Some individuals (the Joyces and the Cézannes of the world) seem capable of conjuring them into existence in a fairly reliable manner. But as a rule they dissipate after a certain interval for the simple reason that they run into resistance from the requirements of sociality.

But I think that it is equally valuable to recognize that breakdowns in “normal” psychic functioning can serve as portals to innovation, opening up, on the private level, the possibility of the “impossible” that Badiou’s truth-event is meant to release on the collective level.

Is Lacan merely a more sophisticated version of Dr. Phil, conveying in unnecessarily obscure language what every self-help guru knows, namely that authenticity is a matter of reaching into the depths of the self to recover hidden gems that allow us to figure out the meaning of our lives?

Lacan does not regard singularity (or authenticity) as a matter of self-possession or self-ownership. Whether Lacanian singularity expresses itself through a miraculous interpellation beyond ideological interpellation, an ethical/divine act of absolute defiance, an uncompromising faithfulness to a truth-event, or the destabilizing jouissance of the signifier, its defining attribute is existential bewilderment rather than reassurance: There is always something about it that wars against the self-help quest for unruffled lives. (165)

Ethics

The fact that we are partially incomprehensible to ourselves—that, among other things, the often quite enigmatic “destiny” generated by our desire is something we can never completely decipher—does not absolve us of ethical accountability, but rather invites us to rethink the very meaning of this accountability. Butler in fact suggests that it is precisely to the extent that we acknowledge the limits of our self-possession and self-ownership that we can begin to forge genuinely ethical relationships to others. This is an ethics based on unqualified intersubjective generosity in the sense that our recognition of our own lack of self-consistency allows us to feel empathy for, and remain patient with, the lack of self-consistency of others, thereby allowing us to enter into a kind of solidarity of vulnerability with them.

Love

the Thing is never as powerful—as likely to enliven and exhilarate us—as when we fall in love

in a certain sense the repetition compulsion is nothing but a rigid version of our language of desire—it can induce us to see in others only what our fantasies dictate rather than what these others actually bring to the encounter.

The purpose of fantasmatic/imaginary supports, then, is to keep the coveted Thing at a reasonable distance so that the subject can relate to the other as someone comparable to itself—as someone it can feel affinity for because it seems familiar. That is, the aim of fantasy is to obfuscate the fact that the enigmas of the other cannot ever be fully resolved, that each attempt to decode an intersubjective mystery can only spawn a multitude of new mysteries.

if I am haunted by a surplus animation that agitates me while simultaneously
lending a thrilling singularity to my being, the other is also fissured by
intensities of desire (and drive) that it cannot fully discipline; it is caught
up in the same tight nexus of turbulence and singularity with which I also struggle. Likewise, in exactly the same way that I cannot access every recess of my interiority, the other cannot access every facet of its being. As a result, my demand that the other disclose its secrets is as unrealistic as it is violating. (177)

“Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness . . . when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession”

Butler cited in Ruti (177)

On this view, ethics requires us to allow ourselves to be touched by the unknowable otherness of the other in ways that transform the basic parameters of our being; our encounter with the enigmatic other obliges us to shed our false self-sufficiency, our conviction of being securely in control of ourselves.

Lacanian ethics

Lacanian ethics demands us to confront what is most alarmingly “inhuman” (“undead”) about the other; it asks us to accept the other not only as our own likeness, but also as the grotesque Thing that cannot be assimilated into our symbolic or imaginary networks of meaning.

Lacanian ethics moves from the other as a reassuring “face” (or “neighbor”) to the much more difficult matter of the other as uncompromisingly “other” — as someone whose jouissance is potentially too close, too alien, too strong, and therefore too traumatic.

The problem with narcissism, as I have argued in this chapter, is that it prompts us to flee from any and all signs of this traumatizing otherness—an act that is made relatively simple by the fact that the world offers a whole host of convenient distractions.

As Santner states, everyday life is filled with various ways of withdrawing,
of “not really being there, of dying to the Other’s presence”. Tragically, even though our answerability to the other’s uncanny presence may reside at the very heart of our receptivity to the world — of our ability to renew ourselves through contact with what is wholly unlike us — we frequently turn away from this answerability out of narcissistic defensiveness. If, as Silverman proposes, interpersonal ethics entails our willingness to let those we love disclose themselves in their own way, narcissism as an ethical failure makes such disclosure impossible. This is how we become incapable of discovering in the other anything besides our own image.

If post-Levinasian ethics tends to emphasize the ethical call of the face,
post-Lacanian ethics tends to stress the terror-inducing strangeness of
the face: the ways in which the face can alarm us to the point of deep
ethical ambivalence.

The political implications of this reformulation are momentous, for it shifts our attention from the nitty-gritty of pluralistic tolerance to the question of how we can relate to those who are not in the least bit similar to us and who may, consequently, make us profoundly uncomfortable.

If post-Levinasian ethics tends to emphasize the ethical call of the face,
post-Lacanian ethics tends to stress the terror-inducing strangeness of
the face: the ways in which the face can alarm us to the point of deep
ethical ambivalence

If post-Levinasian ethics tends to emphasize the ethical call of the face,
post-Lacanian ethics tends to stress the terror-inducing strangeness of
the face: the ways in which the face can alarm us to the point of deep
ethical ambivalence. (189)

On the one hand, there are those culturally intelligible qualities that “can
be formulated as an attribute” — that make the other more or less “like” us, thereby facilitating our capacity to relate to it as an entity whose existential struggles resemble our own. On the other, there is the specter of the other as Thing, as an anxiety-producing and menacing stranger.

This latter is not das Ding as the good object, as the “refound” (m)other who holds the promise of unmediated satisfaction, but rather the other who comes too close, who is disconcerting because of its consuming overproximity. This is one reason that the Lacanian face is more akin to a distorted grimace than to the beseeching face of Levinasian ethics: It expresses the “too muchness” of jouissance, the involuntary spasm, cringe, or wince that betrays the other’s discomfort and disorientation.

In post-Lacanian theory, Lacan’s reflections on the other as Thing, as
the disturbing “stain” that ruptures the (always fantasmatic) coherence of
our social world, have been recast as a political query about how we can ethically relate to what is most terrifying or off -putting (even repellent) about the other. In other words, the ethical concern is no longer how we might manage to recognize others as our equals even when they hold different values—how we might build a viable “human” community out of radically divergent opinions and outlooks—but rather how we are (or are not) able to meet the “inhuman” aspects of the other.

The political implications of this reformulation are momentous, for it shifts our attention from the nitty-gritty of pluralistic tolerance to the question of how we can relate to those who are not in the least bit similar to us and who may, consequently, make us profoundly uncomfortable.

Furthermore, this reformulation has led to a resurgence of universalist ethics that goes against the grain of today’s multicultural sensibilities. The issue is in fact so contentious that some Lacanians appear to be on a warpath against those (such as Derrida and Butler) who advocate a Levinasian perspective.

How, precisely, do we get from the “inhuman” other to universalist ethics? What is such an ethics meant to accomplish? And what are its main blind spots?

If the symbolic stabilizes social exchanges by imposing a set of normative expectations that regulate relationships between subjects, the imaginary allows us to view the other as equivalent to ourselves and, as such, as a possible object of our affection. However, even our symbolic and imaginary fortifications can never completely erase the other as Thing, as the “inhuman partner” of excess jouissance that threatens to overpower the intelligible coordinates of our existence. (192)

What is most innovative about post-Lacanian ethics is its emphasis on the idea that a properly ethical attitude must risk these supports, must risk an encounter with the unsettling “real” of the other’s being. Ethics, in other words, can no longer be merely a matter of more or less prudent interpersonal negotiations within the symbolic and imaginary registers, but instead calls for our ability to withstand the other’s devouring jouissance.

our capacity to endure the unconscious psychic intensities that get activated by the other’s jouissance and that cannot be assimilated into our schemes of symbolic and imaginary reciprocity. As Lacan puts the matter, “One would have to know how to confront the fact that my neighbor’s jouissance, his harmful, malignant jouissance, is that which poses a problem for my love”

Ethics, then, cannot avoid confronting the other’s unique madness and existential confusion, “the always contingent . . . and, in some sense, demonic way in which he contracts a foothold in Being”

The other who claims my attention may be as bewildered, as perplexed and drastically at a loss, with respect to itself as I am with respect to myself.

It is the realization that we do not relate to others merely on the symbolic
and imaginary levels, but also on the level of the real, that has led post-
Lacanian thinkers to reorient ethics from the politics of multicultural
tolerance to ideals of universal justice.

Multiculturalism as an arm of capital assures that every subject enters the (ultimately homogenizing) sphere of consumer economics, becoming, as it were, exchangeable through the very process that professes to promote its “uniqueness.” “Singularity,” instead of summoning the subject beyond its sociosymbolic investments, traps it in an identity category (woman, black, Asian, Arab, gay, etc.) that makes it all the more exploitable.

The truth-event, as well as the process of elaboration that represents
fidelity to this event, thus renders “difference” insignificant by introducing
a truth that is universally applicable to everyone concerned. However, this does not imply an erasure of singularity for, as we have seen, the subject of truth is always, by definition, an immortal—someone who cannot be subsumed into the (unthinking) mass of the collectivity. One might in fact say that only a person who recognizes herself as singular (in the sense of not being a part of a social category) can recognize the singularity—and therefore the equality—of others.

From this perspective, singularity is not merely what founds ethics, but also what comes into being by a faithful adherence to a universal (yet always specific) ethic of truths. Such an ethic is “ethical” precisely insofar as it raises singularity to the realm of the universal.

If class inequality cuts across gender lines, does not gender inequality also cut across class lines? How, then, do we determine the primacy of one struggle over the other? It seems to me that there is no way around the fact that any given situation lends itself to different interpretations—that what constitutes the void of a situation is ambiguous at best—and that mediating between the various voices that aspire to name this void invariably raises concerns about power disparities. (203)

no matter how genuinely “universalist” the intensions of Badiou and Žižek may be, their neo-Marxist theories repeat the masculinist and white-hegemonic weaknesses of classical Marxism so that while class (or one’s status as a member of the “proletariat”) qualifies as a “universal” basis for progressive struggle, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality do not.

When Saint Paul is elevated to the epitome of the “universal subject” at the same time as “woman,” “black,” “gay,” and “Arab” are relegated to the wasteland of “substance-based” (and thus politically useless) identity categories, something is rotten in Denmark. I understand the connection between Saint Paul and God’s “universal” command to love one’s neighbor, but this hardly justifies the valorization of the Judeo-Christian tradition as the linchpin of universalist ethics. (207)

The fact that the other as “inhuman” Thing inevitably derails our attempts to relate to it on a “human” level does not mean that no human bond is possible; the fact that we are asked to meet the disorienting jouissance of the other does not mean that we cannot also experience the other as a socially intelligible “fellow human being” with whom we can enter into an interpersonal rapport of some kind.

One of the dangers of the post-Lacanian insistence on the “monstrous”
aspects of the other is that it can eclipse the realization that, ultimately, we have a great deal in common with each other, that we can to some extent understand and even sympathize with the other. The other who is unknowable is always also in many ways knowable. In short, the fact that contemporary multiculturalist ethics has trouble coming to terms with the other as Thing does not justify reversing matters so that we relate to the Thing exclusively, as if “the other as Thing” was the only thing the other was.

What keeps them from arriving at the same conclusion as Butler does, namely that it is the universality of human precariousness that founds ethics in the sense that my recognition that the other is as woundable as I am offers a starting point for my ethical indignation, outrage, and horror in the face of any and all violence done the other?

The universalist leveling of social distinctions that Badiou and Žižek advocate can be used to hide the fact that we are not, after all, “all equally oppressed.”

This is how even a marginalized subject can become an object of jealousy. This subject is resented to the degree that it is fantasized to be in possession of the kind of jouissance of suffering that the dominant subject lacks. (214)

In this scenario, the marginalized group is seen as robbing the dominant group of enjoyment that is “rightfully” theirs. Žižek understands this better than most.

Yet he, like Badiou, tends to slide into a similar position of resentment whenever the matter of the suffering “other” surfaces as an ethical concern. When this other belongs to the proletariat, things are still fine because the proletariat fulfills the specifications of universality set up by Žižek and Badiou. But the minute the other who suffers is a racial, ethnic, or sexual minority, a woman, or some sort of a postcolonial subject, the limits of universality have been breached.

The Call of Character 2014

My goal in this book is to demonstrate that the crumbling of definitive meaning does not impoverish us—that our awareness that the “point” of human existence always remains a little mysterious should not keep us from leading rewarding lives (19)

we are always in the process of becoming and that it is our existential task to cultivate the unique character that gains momentum from our continuous engagement with this process; it is our responsibility to actualize our potential by tending the spirit that, in an always provisional manner, makes us who we are. (22)

Nothing is more tempting than going with the flow. Yet there are times when the only way to authentically respond to the call of our character is to wade against the current—when the desires that most accurately speak the language of our character are entirely different from those we have been accustomed to take for granted.

In such situations, our task is to find our way out of the maze of collective desires that entrap us in complacent patterns of appreciation. Whether we are talking about our willingness to oppose an oppressive political system, our determination to defend a cause that seems doomed, or our ability to assert the singularity of our being over the predicates of social intelligibility that our cultural order insists on, we are expressing something about the almost inevitable clash between our social identity and our character.

Although none of us can have patterns of appreciation that are completely divorced from the processes of socialization and cultural conditioning that have brought us into being, there is still a big difference between choosing a particular set of values because these values somehow resonate with us, on the one hand, and adopting this set because we are afraid to do otherwise, on the other. That is, when our choices arise from a fear of punishment rather than from an undercurrent of passion, we have sacrificed too much. (35)

Against this backdrop, listening to the call of our character is important not only because it facilitates our private process of self-actualization, but also because it is one of the few ways to ensure that we do not become so immersed in the values of our cultural order that we completely lose our critical faculties. It can serve as a means of defending the liveliness of our spirit, of fending off the kind of psychic death that can ensue from becoming too dedicated to collective norms that make us narrow-minded rather than inquisitive.

There is often a lack of moderation to our character that stuns our social persona. This is exactly why it has the power to dislodge us from the “reasonable” composition of our everyday experience. It is why one of the biggest challenges of human existence is to be able to respond to the call
of our character without at the same time wrecking the rest of our lives.

I stress this point because even though I am clearly rooting for what is singular rather than sanitized, I would never want to imply that our character should always trump our social or interpersonal commitments. Ideally, we should be able to feel authentic while simultaneously participating in the social activities, obligations, and responsibilities that bring stability to our lives. (39)

On this view, the lack within our being is the foundation not only of our personal transformation, but also— insofar as a large enough accumulation of personal transformations results in cultural transformation—of the advancement of society. (48)

In outlining the Thing’s ethical code, I stressed that the enigmatic specificity of our desire can guide us to the kinds of choices that protect our character against the banalities of conventional sociality. The repetition compulsion, in contrast, has a less felicitous outcome. Although it also articulates something about the specificity of our desire, it has frozen into a fixed attitude that strives to bar the unexpected, that strives to eliminate precisely the sort of turmoil that the Thing’s startling echo tends to introduce into our lives. (69)

In other words, if our loyalty to the Thing asks us to remain receptive to what breaks the predictable surface of our daily existence, the repetition compulsion defends this surface. As a consequence, the more intractable our compulsion, the more likely it is that we will end up rejecting the very objects (or activities) that most alluringly resurrect the Thing’s aura for us and that therefore
hold the greatest potential for transforming our lives. Because such objects touch the primordial foundation of our being, because they usher us to the vicinity of what is most vulnerable, most undefended, within us, they may seem too risky. The repetition compulsion counters this risk by keeping us at a safe distance from such objects. The problem, of course, is that by so doing it blocks
our access to objects for which we feel an unusually strong affinity; it deprives us of the possibility of the kind of incandescent satisfaction that only the Thing’s echo is capable of giving us.

hand, we can endeavor to rescue our character from the traumatic grip of the repetition compulsion so that the fixation of our desire gradually yield to new kinds of desires, including ones that carry a more clearly audible echo of the Thing.

This is why there is rarely a sense of potentiality without a degree of anxiety—why we often pay for our newly found freedom with the thumping of our hearts. Yet this thumping is also an indication that although the past exercises a great deal of influence over the present, the present does not need to replicate
it entirely faithfully. (73)

When it comes to painting our personal masterpiece, we can definitely take things too far; we can become so invested in our goals and ambitions that we never give ourselves a break. Even our quest for the notoriously elusive peace of mind can cross the line to pathology, so that we spend huge amounts of energy on spiritual practices that are supposed to guide us to our destination, but that actually keep us from living our lives. But none of this changes the fact that the pain of the past can spur us to various forms of self-reflexivity and self-development. (76)

The best we can do with the pain of the past is to turn it into a resource for living in the present.

The capacity to metabolize—not just to endure, but to metabolize—suffering is an indication of the kind of robustness of spirit that does not allow suffering to become an immovable component of our being …

When you metabolize a substance it is broken down, absorbed, and used.