{"id":12534,"date":"2014-03-21T12:31:28","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T17:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=12534"},"modified":"2014-04-05T07:54:28","modified_gmt":"2014-04-05T11:54:28","slug":"zupancic-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2014\/03\/21\/zupancic-7\/","title":{"rendered":"zupan\u010di\u010d 7 subjectivation without subject"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zupan\u010di\u010d, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real<\/em>. New York: Verso. 2000.<\/p>\n

‘Act so that the maxim of your will can always hold at the same time as the principle giving universal law’<\/strong> \u2014 what is the paradox implicit in this formulation of the categorical imperative?<\/p>\n

The paradox<\/span><\/strong> is that, despite its ‘categorical’ character, it somehow leaves everything wide open .<\/p>\n

For how am I to decide<\/strong> if (the maxim of) my action can hold as a principle providing a universal law<\/strong>, if I do not accept the presupposition that I am originally guided by some notion of the good (i.e. some notion of what is universally acceptable)?<\/p>\n

In other words, there is no a priori criterion of universality.<\/span> <\/strong>It is true that Kant was convinced that he had found this criterion in the principle of non-contradiction. However, there is an impressive body of commentary demonstrating the weakness of this criterion. 92<\/p>\n

Kant invents two stories which are supposed, first, to ‘prove’ the existence of the moral law\u00a0 and, secondly, to demonstrate that the subject cannot act contrary to his pathological interests for any reason other than that of the moral law. The first story concerns a man who is placed in the situation of being executed on his way out of the bedroom<\/strong> as a condition of spending the night with the woman he desires . The other story, which we have already discussed, concerns a man who is put in the position of either bearing false witness against someone who, as a result, will lose his life, or being put to death himself if he does not do so.<\/p>\n

As a comment on the first alternative , Kant simply affirms: ‘We do not have to guess very long what his [the man’s in question] answer would be.’<\/p>\n

As for the second story, Kant claims that it is at least possible to imagine that a man would rather die than tell a lie and send another man to his death.<\/p>\n

It follows from these two comments that there is no ‘force’ apart from the moral law that could make us act against our well-being and our ‘pathological interests’. Lacan raises the objection that such a ‘force’ \u2014 namely, jouissance<\/span> (as distinct from pleasure ) – does exist:<\/p>\n

The striking significance of the first example resides in the fact that the night spen t with the lady is paradoxically presented to us as a pleasure that is weighed against a punishment to be undergone … but one only has to make a conceptual shift and move the night spent with the lady from the category of pleasure to that of jouissance<\/span>, given that jouissance<\/span> implies precisely the acceptance of death<\/strong> … for the example to be ruined.<\/em> (Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis<\/em>. 1992, 189). 99<\/p>\n

For Kant, it is unimaginable that someone would want his own destruction \u2014 this would be diabolical \u2014 Lacan’s answer is not that this is nevertheless imaginable, and that even such extreme cases exist, but that there is nothing extreme in it at all: on a certain level every subject, average as he may be, wants his destruction,<\/strong><\/span> whether he wants it or not<\/span>. 100<\/p>\n

Kant’s point can be formulated more generally: there is no (ethical) act without a subject who is equal to this act. This, however, implies the effacement of the distinction between the level of the enunciation<\/span> and the level of the statement<\/span>: the subject of the statement<\/strong> has to coincide with the subject of the enunciation<\/strong> – or, more precisely, the subject of enunciation has to be entirely reducible to the subject of the statement.<\/strong> 102<\/p>\n

The am lying <\/em><\/strong>is a signifier which forms a part, in the Other, of the treasury of vocabulary. This ‘vocabulary’ is something that I can use as a tool, or something that can use me as a ‘talking machine’. As subject, I emerge on the other level, the level of enunciation, and this level is irreducible.<\/p>\n

Here we come, once again, to the point which explains why the subject cannot ‘hide behind’ the Law, presenting himself as its mere instrument: what is suspended by such a gesture is precisely the<\/span><\/strong> level of the enunciation<\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n

That ‘there is no deposit without a depositor who is equal to his task’, or ‘there is no (ethical) act without the subject who is equal to his act’, implies that we set as the criterion or the condition of the ‘realization’ of an act the abolition of the difference between the statement and the enunciation<\/strong>. 102<\/p>\n

But the crucial question is why the abolition of this difference should be the criterion or the necessary condition of an act.<\/p>\n

Why claim that the accomplishment of an act presupposes the abolition of this split?<\/p>\n

It is possible to situate the act in another, inverse perspective: it is precisely the act, the (‘successful’) act, which fully discloses this split, makes it present. From this perspective, the definition of a successful act would be that it is structured exactly like the paradox of the liar: this structure is the same as the one evoked by the liar who says ‘I am lying’, who utters ‘ the impossible’ and thus fully displays the split between the level of the statement<\/span> <\/strong>and the level of the enunciation<\/span><\/strong>, between the shifter ‘I’ and the signifier ‘am lying’.<\/p>\n

To claim, as we are claiming here, that there is no subject or ‘hero’ of the act means that at the level of ‘am lying’, the subject is always pathological (in the Kantian sense of the word), determined by the Other, by the signifiers which precede him. At this level, the subject is reducible or ‘dispensable’.<\/p>\n

But this is not all there is to it. Whereas the ‘subject’ of the statement<\/strong><\/span> is determined in advance (he can only use the given signifiers), the (shifter) I <\/strong><\/em>is determined retroactively<\/strong><\/em>: it ‘becomes a signification, engendered at the level of the statement, of what it produces at the level of the enunciation<\/strong><\/span>‘.<\/p>\n

It is at this level that we must situate the ethical subject:<\/span> at the level of something which becomes<\/strong><\/span> what ‘it is’ only in the act (here a ‘speech act) engendered, so to speak, by another subject. 103<\/p>\n

However, the fact that the act ‘reveals’ the difference between the level of the statement<\/span><\/strong> and the level of the enunciation<\/span> <\/strong>does not imply that the subject of the act is a divided subject. On the contrary, we know very well that when we are really dealing with an act, the subject ‘is all there in his act’.<\/p>\n

What reveals the distinction between the statement and the enunciation<\/strong>, between the subject who says or does something and the subjective figure which arises from it, is precisely the abolition of the division of the subject. Of course, this does not mean that the subject of an act is a ‘full ‘ subject who knows exactly what he wants but, rather, that the subject ‘is realized’, ‘objectified<\/strong>‘ in this act: the subject passes over to the side of the object<\/span>. The ethical subject is not a subject who wants<\/em> <\/strong>this object but, rather, this object itself.\u00a0 In an act, there is no ‘divided subject’: there is the ‘it’ (the Lacanian\u00a0\u00e7a<\/i>) and the subjective figure that arises from it.<\/p>\n

We may thus conclude that the act in the proper sense of the word follows the logic of what Lacan calls a ‘headless subjectivation’ or a ‘subjectivation without subject’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zupan\u010di\u010d, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000. ‘Act so that the maxim of your will can always hold at the same time as the principle giving universal law’ \u2014 what is the paradox implicit in this formulation of the categorical imperative? The paradox is that, despite its ‘categorical’ character, it somehow … Continue reading “zupan\u010di\u010d 7 subjectivation without subject”<\/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":[79,76,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics_real","category-sub-destitute","category-subjectivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12534","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=12534"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12663,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12534\/revisions\/12663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}