{"id":9693,"date":"2012-11-05T12:38:45","date_gmt":"2012-11-05T17:38:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9693"},"modified":"2012-12-04T23:00:51","modified_gmt":"2012-12-05T04:00:51","slug":"subject-of-desire-subject-of-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/05\/subject-of-desire-subject-of-drive\/","title":{"rendered":"subject of desire subject of drive"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, The Lesbian Session<\/a> Lacanian Ink<\/em> 2000 \u00a0And here too<\/a><\/p>\n

What we get after \u201ctraversing the fantasy<\/span>,\u201d i.e. the pure being of drive<\/span> which emerges after the subject undergoes “subjective destitution,”<\/span> is NOT a kind of subjectless loop of the repetitive movement of drive, but, on the contrary, the subject at its purest<\/span>; one is almost tempted to say: the subject \u201cas such.\u201d \u00a0 Saying \u201cYes!\u201d to the drive, i.e. precisely to that which can never be subjectivized, freely assuming the inevitable (the drive\u2019s radical closure), is the highest gesture of subjectivity.<\/p>\n

It is thus only after assuming a fundamental indifference towards the Other\u2019s desire, getting rid of the hysterical game of subjectivization, after suspending the intersubjective game of mutual (mis)recognition, that the pure subject emerges \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

We have thus Roark as the being of pure drive in no need of symbolic recognition (and as such uncannily close to the Lacanian saint<\/p>\n

Roark displays the perfect indifference towards the Other characteristic of drive<\/span>, while Dominique remains caught in the dialectic of desire which is the desire of the Other<\/span>: she is gnawed by the Other\u2019s gaze, i.e. by the fact that others, the common people totally insensitive to Roark\u2019s achievement, are allowed to stare at it and thus spoil its sublime quality. The only way for her to break out of this deadlock of the Other\u2019s desire is to destroy the sublime object in order to save it from becoming the object of the ignorant gaze of others<\/p>\n

Roark, of course, is well aware of how her attempts to ruin him result from her desperate strategy to cope with her unconditional love for him, to inscribe this love in the field of the big Other; so, when she offers herself to him, he repeatedly rejects her and tells her that the time is not yet ripe for it: she will become his true partner only when her desire for him will no longer be bothered by the Other\u2019s gaze \u2014 in short, when she will accomplish the shift from desire to drive<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What the hystericized prime mover<\/strong> must accept is thus the fundamental existential indifference: she must no longer be willing to remain the hostage of the second-handers\u2019 blackmail \u00a0\u201cWe will let you work and realize your creative potential, on condition that you accept our terms,\u201d<\/p>\n

… she must be ready to give up the very kernel of her being, that which means everything to her, and to accept the \u201cend of the world,\u201d<\/span> the (temporary) suspension of the very flow of energy which keeps the world running.<\/p>\n

In order to gain everything, she must be ready to go through the zero-point of losing everything<\/span>. And far from signalling the \u201cend of subjectivity,\u201d this act of assuming existential indifference is perhaps the very gesture of absolute negativity which gives birth to the subject<\/span>.<\/p>\n

What Lacan calls “subjective destitution”<\/span> is thus, paradoxically, another name for the subject itself, i.e. for the void beyond the theatre of hysterical subjectivizations.<\/p>\n

Ayn Rand\u2019s work thus contains two radically different narratives which are not to be confused:<\/strong><\/p>\n

1) the standard masculine narrative of the struggle between the exceptional One (Master, Creator) and the \u201ccrowd\u201d which follows the universal norm,<\/p>\n

2) as well as the feminine narrative of the shift from desire to drive<\/strong>, i.e. from the hysteric\u2019s entanglement in the deadlocks of the Other\u2019s desire to the fundamental indifference of the desubjectivized being of drive.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For that reason, the Randian hero is not \u201cphallocratic\u201d \u2014 phallocratic is rather the figure of the failed Master (Wynand in The Fountainhead<\/em>, Stadler in Atlas Shrugged<\/em>): paradoxical as it may sound, with regard to the formulas of sexuation<\/span>, the being of pure drive<\/span> which emerges once the subject \u201cgoes through the fantasy\u201d and assumes the attitude of indifference towards the enigma of the Other\u2019s desire is a feminine figure.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Rand was not aware of was that the upright, uncompromising masculine figures with a will of steel that she was so fascinated with, are, effectively, figures of the feminine subject liberated from the deadlocks of hysteria<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Such a reading also enables us to draw a crucial theoretical conclusion about the limits of subjectivity: hysteria is not the limit of subjectivity \u2014 there is a subject beyond hysteria.<\/span><\/p>\n

What we get after “traversing the fantasy,”<\/span>i.e. pure being of drive<\/span> which emerges after the subject undergoes “subjective destitution”<\/span> is not a kind of subjectless loop of the repetitive movement of drive, but, on the contrary, the subject at its purest; one is almost tempted to say: the subject \u201cas such.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saying \u201cYes!\u201d to the drive, i.e. precisely to that which can never be subjectivized,<\/span> freely assuming the inevitable (the drive\u2019s radical closure), is the highest gesture of subjectivity.<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0It is thus only after assuming a fundamental indifference towards the Other\u2019s desire, getting rid of the hysterical game of subjectivization, after suspending the intersubjective game of mutual (mis)recognition, that the pure subject emerges.<\/span><\/p>\n

One can see, now, in what precise sense, the struggle between the hysterical feminine heroine and the persistent male hero, which forms the center of Ayn Rand\u2019s both great novels, can be conceived as a barely concealed presentation of a lesbian (psychoanalytic) session: of the painful process in the course of which the feminine analysand traverses her fantasy<\/span> and thus overcomes her hysterical position.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, The Lesbian Session Lacanian Ink 2000 \u00a0And here too What we get after \u201ctraversing the fantasy,\u201d i.e. the pure being of drive which emerges after the subject undergoes “subjective destitution,” is NOT a kind of subjectless loop of the repetitive movement of drive, but, on the contrary, the subject at its purest; one is … Continue reading “subject of desire subject of drive”<\/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":[111,125,24,142,76,15,70,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-drive","category-lacan","category-nightworld","category-sub-destitute","category-subjectivity","category-traversing-the-fantasy","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9693","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=9693"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9695,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9693\/revisions\/9695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}