{"id":12150,"date":"2013-10-12T14:12:57","date_gmt":"2013-10-12T19:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=12150"},"modified":"2013-10-12T14:31:03","modified_gmt":"2013-10-12T19:31:03","slug":"subject-failed-articulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/10\/12\/subject-failed-articulation\/","title":{"rendered":"subject failed articulation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u017dI\u017dEK, SLAVOJ. A reply: with enemies like these, who needs friends?<\/span><\/em> Revue Internationale de Philosophie<\/em> 2012. 439-457.<\/p>\n

Download Revue internationale de philosophie here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Communism should no longer be conceived as the subjective (re)appropriation of the alienated substantial content \u2014 all versions of reconciliation conceived as \u201csubject swallows the substance\u201d should be rejected.<\/p>\n

The Hegelian subject has no substantial actuality, it comes second, it only emerges through the process of separation, of overcoming of its presuppositions, and these presuppositions are also just a retroactive effect of the same process of their overcoming.<\/p>\n

The result is thus that there is, at both extremes of the process, a failure-negativity inscribed into the very heart of the entity we are dealing with.<\/p>\n

If the status of the subject is thoroughly \u201cprocessual,\u201d it means that it emerges through the very failure to fully actualize itself.<\/p>\n

This brings us again to one of the possible formal definitions of subject: a subject tries to articulate (\u201cexpress\u201d) itself in a signifying chain, this articulation fails, and by means and through this failure, the subject emerges: the subject is the failure of its signifying representation<\/span><\/strong> \u2014 this is why Lacan writes the subject of the signifier as $<\/strong>, as \u201cbarred.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a love letter, the very failure of the writer to formulate his declaration in a clear and efficient way, his oscillations, the letter\u2019s fragmentation, etc., can in themselves be the proof (perhaps the necessary and the only reliable proof) that the professed love is authentic \u2014 here, the very failure to deliver the message properly is the sign of its authenticity. If the message is delivered in a smooth way, it arouses suspicions that it is part of a well-planned approach, or that the writer loves himself, the beauty of his writing, more than his love-object, i.e., that the object is effectively reduced to a pretext for engaging in the narcissistically-satisfying activity of writing.<\/p>\n

And the same goes for substance: substance is not only always-already lost, it only comes to be through its loss<\/strong>, as a secondary return-to-itself \u2014 which means that substance is always-already subjectivized.<\/p>\n

In \u201creconciliation\u201d between subject and substance, both poles thus lose their firm identity.<\/p>\n

Let us take the case of ecology: radical emancipatory politics should aim neither at the complete mastery over nature nor at the humanity\u2019s humble acceptance of the predominance of Mother-Earth. Rather, nature should be exposed in all its catastrophic contingency and indeterminacy, and human agency assumed in the whole unpredictability of its consequences \u2014 viewed from this perspective of the \u201cother Hegel,\u201d the revolutionary act no longer involves as its agent the Lukacsean substance-subject, the agent who knows what it does while doing it.<\/p>\n

One is even tempted to talk here about Marx\u2019s \u201cidealist reversal of Hegel\u201d: in contrast to Hegel who was well aware that the owl of Minerva takes of only at the evening dusk, after the fact, i.e., that Thought follows Being (which is why, for Hegel, there can be no scientifi c insight into the future of society), Marx reasserts the primacy of Thought: the owl of Minerva (German contemplative philosophy) should be replaced by the singing of the Gaelic rooster (French revolutionary thought) \u2014 in the proletarian revolution, Thought will precede Being.<\/p>\n

Does, however, this mean that the ultimate subjective position we can adopt is that of a split which characterizes the fetishist disavowal? Is all we can do take the stance of \u201calthough I know well there is no big Other, the big Other is only the sedimentation, the reified form, of intersubjective interactions, I am compelled to act as if the big Other is an external force which controls us all\u201d?<\/p>\n

Lack in the Other<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It is here that Lacan\u2019s fundamental insight into how the big Other is \u201cbarred,\u201d lacking, in-existing even, acquires its weight: the big Other is not the substantial Ground which secretly pulls the strings<\/strong>, it is inconsistent\/lacking, its very functioning depends on subjects whose participation in the symbolic process sustains it. Instead of either the submersion of the subject into its substantial Other or the subject\u2019s appropriation of this Other we thus get a mutual implication through lack, through the overlapping of the two lacks, the lack constitutive of the subject and the lack of\/in the Other itself. It is perhaps time to read Hegel\u2019s famous formula \u201cOne should grasp the Absolute not only as substance, but also as subject<\/span>\u201d more cautiously and literally: the point is not that the Absolute is not substance, but subject. The point is hidden in the \u201cnot only\u2026 but also\u201d: the interplay between the two, which also opens up the space of freedom \u2014 we are free because there is a lack in the Other, because the substance out of which we grew and on which we rely in inconsistent, barred, failed, marked by an impossibility.<\/p>\n

However, what kind of freedom is thereby opened up<\/strong>? One should raise here a clear and brutal question in all its naivety: but if we reject Marx\u2019s critique of Hegel and stick to Hegel\u2019s notion of the owl of Minerva which takes off only in the evening \u2014 i.e., if we accept Hegel\u2019s claim that the position of a historical agent who is able to identify its own role in the historical process and act accordingly is inherently impossible, since such a self-referentiality makes it impossible for the agent to take into account to impact of its own intervention, how this act itself will affect the constellation \u2014, what are the consequences of this position for the act, for emancipatory political interventions?<\/p>\n

Does it mean that we are condemned to blind acts, to risky steps into the unknown whose final outcome totally eludes us, to interventions whose meaning we can establish only retroactively, so that at the moment of the act, we can only hope that history will show mercy (grace) and crown our intervention with a minimum of success?<\/p>\n

But what if, instead of conceiving this impossibility to take into account the consequences of our acts as a limitation of our freedom, we conceive it as the zero-level (negative) condition of our freedom?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

We are free only against the background of this non-transparency<\/strong>: if it were to be possible for us to fully predict the consequences of our acts, our freedom would effectively be only the \u201cknown necessity\u201d in the pseudo-Hegelian way, i.e., it would consist in freely choosing and wanting what we know to be necessary. In this sense, freedom and necessity would fully coincide: I act freely when I knowingly follow my inner necessity, the instigations that I found in myself as my true substantial nature\u2026 but if this is the case, we are back from Hegel to Aristotle, i.e., we are no longer dealing with the Hegelian subject who itself produces (\u201cposits\u201d) its own content, but with an agent bent on actualizing its immanent potentials, its positive \u201cessential forces,\u201d as the young Marx put it in his deeply Aristotelian critique of Hegel. What gets lost here is the entire dialectics of the constitutive retroactivity of sense, of the continuous retroactive (re)totalization of our experience.<\/p>\n

But, again, what does this mean for our ability to act, to intervene into ongoing history? There are in French two words for \u201cfuture\u201d which cannot be adequately rendered in English: futur<\/em> <\/strong>and avenir<\/em><\/strong>. Futur<\/span> <\/em>stands for future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of the tendencies which are already here, while avenir<\/span><\/em> points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present \u2014 avenir<\/em><\/span> is what is to come \/a venir\/, not just what will be.<\/p>\n

Say, in today\u2019s apocalyptic global situation, the ultimate horizon of the \u201cfuture\u201d is what Dupuy calls the dystopian \u201cfixed point,\u201d the zero-point of the ecological breakdown, of global economic and social chaos, etc. \u2014 even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual \u201cattractor\u201d towards which our reality, left to itself, tends.<\/p>\n

The way to combat the catastrophe is through acts which interrupt this drifting towards the catastrophic \u201cfixed point\u201d and take upon themselves the risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness \u201cto come.\u201d (We can see here how ambiguity the slogan \u201cno future\u201d is: at a deeper level, it does not designate the closure, the impossibility of change, but what we should be striving for \u2014 to break the hold of the catastrophic \u201cfuture\u201d cover up and thereby open up the space for something New \u201cto come.\u201d) 455<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u017dI\u017dEK, SLAVOJ. A reply: with enemies like these, who needs friends? Revue Internationale de Philosophie 2012. 439-457. Download Revue internationale de philosophie here. Communism should no longer be conceived as the subjective (re)appropriation of the alienated substantial content \u2014 all versions of reconciliation conceived as \u201csubject swallows the substance\u201d should be rejected. The Hegelian subject … Continue reading “subject failed articulation”<\/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":[83,100,76,15,106,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agency","category-hegel","category-sub-destitute","category-subjectivity","category-the-act","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12150","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=12150"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12156,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12150\/revisions\/12156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}