{"id":9856,"date":"2012-11-19T10:31:35","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T15:31:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9856"},"modified":"2012-11-19T13:05:08","modified_gmt":"2012-11-19T18:05:08","slug":"cartesian-subject-emptied-of-all-symbolic-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/19\/cartesian-subject-emptied-of-all-symbolic-content\/","title":{"rendered":"Cartesian subject emptied of all symbolic content"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u017di\u017eek. <a href=\"http:\/\/newleftreview.org\/II\/57\/slavoj-zizek-how-to-begin-from-the-beginning\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;How to Begin from the Beginning.&#8221; NLR May\/June 2009<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The predominant <strong>liberal notion of democracy<\/strong> also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of <strong>universality embodied in the excluded<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have \u2018nothing to lose but their chains\u2019, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, <strong>empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content<\/strong>, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to \u2018substanceless subjectivity\u2019, as Marx put it in the <em>Grundrisse<\/em>. The figure of the <span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-size: 12pt;\">&#8220;part of no part&#8221;<\/span>confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u017di\u017eek. &#8220;How to Begin from the Beginning.&#8221; NLR May\/June 2009 The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/19\/cartesian-subject-emptied-of-all-symbolic-content\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Cartesian subject emptied of all symbolic content&#8221;<\/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":[83,35,76,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agency","category-concrete_universal","category-sub-destitute","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9856","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=9856"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9858,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9856\/revisions\/9858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}