{"id":465,"date":"2008-09-09T18:21:16","date_gmt":"2008-09-09T22:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=465"},"modified":"2008-10-21T15:15:56","modified_gmt":"2008-10-21T19:15:56","slug":"thrown-subjects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2008\/09\/09\/thrown-subjects\/","title":{"rendered":"Thrown subjects"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thrown Subject: a subject that is nothing but the identities conferred by its culture or ‘world’.\u00a0 However, as this structure is marked by a fundamental lack\u201d an impossibility which becomes evident in moments of dislocation\u201d it is able under certain conditions to engage and act.\u00a0 This moment of identification is the moment of the radical subject<\/span> which discloses the subject as an agent in its world.\u00a0 Nevertheless as lack is constitutive both of the structure and of the subject, the construction of any identity \u201dor the linking together of identities into a common project\u201d is always contingent and precarious.\u00a0 In this sense, identities are always ‘failed identities’, which never fulfil the telos of subjective identification, thus rendering them vulnerable to further dislocation.\u00a0 In sum, ‘far from being a moment of the structure, the subject is the result of the impossibility of constituting the structure as such’ (Laclau 1990, 41).\u00a0 Situated within this poststructuralist horizon, our aim is thus to plot a path away from thinking about the subject as simply a discursive position, to thinking about it as constitutively incomplete and split.\u00a0 This conception of subject is predicated on four notions: lack, identity, identification, enjoyment<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The subject is marked by a constitutive lack<\/strong> or, to put it differently, by an identity<\/strong> which is impossible to fully suture.\u00a0 It is an ontological feature of subjectivity which is empirically disclosed in moments of dislocation when it is no longer clear how the subject is to ‘go on’, that is, when it is undecided as to how it is to follow the rules, for instance, or engage in\u00a0its routinized practices.\u00a0 In short, lack is revealed when identities fail, that is, in situations where the contingency or the undecidability of social structures is made visible.\u00a0 It is in these situations of structural failure that we see the emergence of subjectivity in its radical form: subjects are literally compelled to engage in acts of identification<\/em>, whose aim is to fill the void made visible by a dislocatory event with new signifiers and discourses.<\/strong> Here the subject is ‘merely the distance between the undecidable structure and the decision (Laclau 1990, 39).\u00a0 A person becomes a subject in this sense …\u00a0 (129)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thrown Subject: a subject that is nothing but the identities conferred by its culture or ‘world’.\u00a0 However, as this structure is marked by a fundamental lack\u201d an impossibility which becomes evident in moments of dislocation\u201d it is able under certain conditions to engage and act.\u00a0 This moment of identification is the moment of the radical … Continue reading “Thrown subjects”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,15,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lack","category-subjectivity","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465","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=465"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1143,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions\/1143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}