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Many times I am asked the obvious yet pertinent question about the title of my longest book: "so who or what is tickling the ticklish subject?" The answer, of course, is: the object - however, which object? This, in a nutshell (or, rather, as a nut within the shell), is the topic of the present book. The difference between subject and object can also be rendered as the difference between the two corresponding verbs, to subject (submit) oneself and to object (protest, oppose, make an obstacle). The subject's elementary, founding, gesture is to subject itself - voluntarily, of course: as both Wagner and Nietzsche, the two great opponents, were well aware of, the highest act of freedom is the display of <i>amor fati</i>, the act of freely assuming what is otherwise necessary. If, then, the subject's activity is, at its most fundamental, the activity of submitting oneself to the inevitable, the fundamental mode of object's passivity, of its passive presence, is that which moves, annoys, disturbs, traumatizes us (subjects): the object is at its most radical that which objects, that which disturbs the smooth run of things. <a name="1"></a><a href="#1x">1</a> The paradox is thus that the roles are reversed (with regard to the standard notion of the active subject working on the passive object): the subject is defined by a fundamental passivity, and it is the object from which movement comes, i.e., which does the tickling. But, again, WHICH is this object? The answer is: the parallax object.<br><br>

[[Category:Articles by Slavoj Žižek]]

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