{"id":10538,"date":"2013-03-05T11:23:05","date_gmt":"2013-03-05T16:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=10538"},"modified":"2013-03-05T13:12:41","modified_gmt":"2013-03-05T18:12:41","slug":"10538","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/03\/05\/10538\/","title":{"rendered":"subject versus subject-position"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television<\/a>” The Symptom<\/em> 9 Summer 2008.<\/p>\n

Here, however, we must carefully distinguish between this Lacanian <\/span>notion of the divided<\/strong> subject<\/span> and the \u201cpost-structuralist\u201d notion of \u00a0the subject-positions<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In \u201cpost-structuralism,\u201d the subject<\/span> is usually reduced to subjection. He is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the subject<\/span> is always caught in, traversed by, the pre-subjective process (of \u201cwriting,\u201d of \u201cdesire,\u201d \u00a0etc.), and the accent is put on\u00a0different modes of how individuals \u201cexperience,\u201d \u201clive,\u201d their positions as \u201csubjects,\u201d \u201cactors,\u201d \u201cagents\u201d of the historical process. For example, it is only at a certain point in European history that the author of works of art, a painter or a \u00a0writer, began to see himself as a creative individual who, in his work, is giving expression to his interior subjective richness. The great master of such analysis was, of course, Foucault<\/strong>: one might say that the main point of his late work was to articulate the different modes of how individuals assume their subject-positions<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

But with Lacan<\/span>, we have quite another notion of the subject<\/span>. To put it in a simple way: if we abstract, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals \u201clive\u201d their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled out with this richness; and this original void<\/span>, this lack<\/span> of the symbolic structure is the<\/span> subject<\/span>, the subject<\/span> of the signifier<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The subject<\/span> is therefore to be strictly opposed to the effect of<\/span> subjectivation<\/strong>: what the subjectivation masks<\/strong> is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack<\/span> in the structure, a lack<\/span> which is the subject<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Our predominant idea of the subject<\/span> is, in Lacanian terms, that of the “subject of the signified,”<\/span> the active agent, the bearer of some signification who is trying to express himself in the language. The starting point of Lacan is, of course, that the symbolic representation represents the subject<\/span> always in a distorted way, that it is always a displacement, a failure, i.e., that the subject<\/span> cannot find a signifier which would be \u201chis own,\u201d that he is always saying less or too much, in short: something other than what he wanted, intended to say.<\/span><\/p>\n

The usual conclusion from this would be that the subject<\/span> is some kind of interior richness of meaning which always exceeds its symbolic articulation: \u201clanguage cannot express fully what I\u2019m trying to say\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The Lacanian thesis is its exact opposite: this surplus of signification masks a fundamental lack<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The subject of the signifier<\/span> is precisely this lack<\/span>, this impossibility to find a signifier which would be \u201chis own\u201d: the failure of his representation is a positive condition.<\/p>\n

The subject<\/span> tries to articulate himself in a signifying representation, and the representation fails; instead of a richness we have a lack<\/span>, and this void opened by the failure is the subject of the signfier.<\/span><\/p>\n

To put it in a paradoxical way: the subject of the signifier<\/span> is a retroactive effect of the failure of his own representation;<\/span> that\u2019s why the failure of representation is the only way to represent him adequately.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008. Here, however, we must carefully distinguish between this Lacanian notion of the divided subject and the \u201cpost-structuralist\u201d notion of \u00a0the subject-positions. In \u201cpost-structuralism,\u201d the subject is usually reduced to subjection. He is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the subject is always caught in, … Continue reading “subject versus subject-position”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,76,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foucault","category-sub-destitute","category-subjectivity","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10538"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10558,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10538\/revisions\/10558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}