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What is the [[subject ]] and why is it so important?[[Summary]]Descartes’ [[cogito ]] is the basis of the subject – not as a substantial, [[transparent ]] and fully [[self]]-[[conscious ]] ‘i’, but as an empty [[space]], what is [[left ]] when the rest of the [[world ]] is expelled from itself.The [[symbolic ]] [[order ]] is what substitutes for the [[loss ]] of the immediacy of the world, and is where the [[void ]] of the subject is filled in by [[subjectivization]]. The [[process ]] of subjectivization is where the subject is given an [[identity ]] and also where that identity is altered or changed by the self.

Advanced by [[philosopher ]] rene [[descartes ]] (1596-1650).The point of the procedure known as [[cartesian ]] [[doubt ]] is to establish what can really be known.Descartes concludes that his [[thought ]] must [[exist]], if it is to be [[deceived]]. (myers 32)This [[principle ]] – ‘i [[think]], therefore i am’ or ‘cogito, ergo sum’ is what the term ‘cogito’ designates.Post-[[structuralism]]

Two way s of [[interpreting ]] the cogito – the post-[[structuralist ]] version and zizek’s version.

When descartes states ‘i who thought thus must be soemthing’, we udnerstnad that ‘i’, the ‘i’ of the cogito, to be an [[individual]].It is the ‘i’ that does the [[thinking ]] – the [[thoughts ]] belong to him rather than him to the thougths.The ‘i’ of the cogito is the [[master ]] of itself.An individual is therefore self-transparent – [[nothing ]] impedes its [[understanding ]] of itself because it is in [[total ]] [[control ]] and has total [[autonomy ]] over its actions.

The individual conceive in this way is uttterly [[subjective]]; everything remains within its dominion and subject to its control.

Against the background of this rampant subjectivism, then, it is perhaps not surprising that [[philosophers ]] (among [[them ]] the post-structuralists) discerned the [[need ]] for a corrective dose of objectivism.In creating the field of psychoanlaysis at the beginning the the twentieth century, freud’s disclosure of the [[unconscious ]] demosntrated that much of our [[psychic ]] [[life ]] is inaccessible and beyond our control.All of these developments, along with [[others]], [[help ]] to breach the seemingly impervious usbjectivism of the individaul, showing it to be subject to forces [[outside ]] of itself, or else that it belon to a world of which it was not the center.

Post-structuralists reject the [[notion ]] of the cogito with its associated individualism and advance in its stead the [[idea ]] of the [[decentred ]] subject.This subject is not an [[autonomous ]] [[being ]] with the [[power ]] of self-determiantion but rather an effect of the [[structure ]] of disocurse where competing [[discourses ]] intersect and [[speak ]] through the subject.In this way, the [[meaning ]] of the usubject is not [[inside ]] or at the center of itself; instead the meaning of the subject is decentered or located outside of the subject in the competing discourses, in, for example, the [[discourse ]] of the unconscious or [[ideology]].

It cannot determine itself but is subject to (or in a ‘subject positon’ to) the domiannt [[ideologies]].

In [[other ]] [[words]], the post-structuralist subject is, as [[derrida ]] argues, merely ‘a “function” of language’, a kind of symbolic [[automaton ]] doomed to ventriloquize the discourse of the big other.[[Madness]]: the vanishing mediator between [[nature ]] and [[culture]]The method of cartesian doubt affords us a telling insight into how we transform from being immersed in nature (or objectivity) to beings supported by culture (or [[subjectivity]]).How is it that at one [[moment ]] we are just part of nature, part of an [[objective ]] world, and in the next moment we are [[speaking ]] beings able to adopt a subjective attitude towards the rest of the world?

The [[missing ]] link between nature and culture is to be found in the process of cartesian doubt.[[Zizek ]] describes the process of cartesian doubt as a [[withdrawal ]] into self – a withdrawal [[symbolized ]] by descartes’s own [[physical ]] withdrawal into the oven.Descartes cuts himself off from the world, systematically severing all [[links ]] with his environs until all he is left with is the cogito.

“this night, the inner of anture, that [[exists ]] here – pure self – in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head – there [[another ]] white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so [[disappears]]. On ecatchs [[sight ]] of this night when one looks [[human ]] beings in the eye – into a night that becomes awful.” (catu 258)It is only when [[reality ]] is eclipsed by this ‘night of the world’, when the world itself is experienced only as loss, as absolute negativity, that is becomes possibile, and indeed necessary (if we are to escape from madness), to [[construct ]] a symbolic [[universe ]] or a universe of culture.Descartes’s withdrawal-into-self is precisely such an [[experience ]] of radical loss.

This empty point of negativity is not ‘nothing’ but the oppsotie of everything, or the [[negation ]] of all determinancy.It is in this empty space devoid of all [[content]], that zizek locates the subject.

It is this void that enables the transition from a [[state ]] of nature to a state of culture.If there was no gap between a [[thing ]] (or an [[object]]) and the [[representation ]] of that thing (or [[word]]), then they would be identical and there would be no room for subjectivity.Words can only exist if we first ‘murder’ [[the thing]], if we create a gap between them and the things they [[represent]].

We have to ‘get rid’ of the [[real ]] before we can construct a [[substitute ]] for it in [[the symbolic]].

Madness, therefore, is a prerequistie for sanity, that is, for the ‘normalcy’ of a [[civilized ]] subject.

The [[birth ]] of god: [[reading ]] the cogito via [[schelling]][[German ]] philosopher fredrich wilhelm joseph von shelling (1775-1854).The second draft of schelling’s die weltalter (or ages of the world), the [[text ]] in which schelling consideres nothing less than the genesis of god.

Zizek designates this beginning with an upper [[case ]] ‘b’ – it is the ‘beginning’. However, schelling’s philosophhy is all [[about ]] the fact that the beginning is not at the beginning.Before the beginning ‘is the chaotic-[[psychotic ]] universe of blind [[drives]], their rotary motion, their undifferentiated pulsating’ (tir 13).

The nature of this abyss is one of unmitigated [[freedom]]. It is not a freedom that ‘belongs’ to anyone, it is not the predicate of a subject; it is, rather, ‘a pure impersonal willing (wollen) that wills nothing’ (taof 15), the brute [[contingent ]] fact which, for schelling, must be presupposed to exist.

Nevertheless, wanting ‘nothing’ is an assertion in itself, as zizek explains: “the pure potentiality of the primordial freedom – this blissful tranquillity, this pure [[enjoyment]], of an unassertive, netural will which wants nothing –actualizes itself in the guise of a will which actively, effectively, wants this ‘nothing’ – that is, the annihiltion of every positive, determinate content.” (tir 23)

The will that wants something is the positive, expansive will, while the will that wants precisely nothing is the [[negative]], contracting will.

God, in other words, is merely part of the grund, of the basis of reality, but not yet an independent entity in his own [[right]]; for god to achieve his independence he has to disentangle himself from the grund.“in order to posit itself as an actual free entity disengaged from blind [[necessity ]] – in short as a person – the absolute has to get thigns straightened out, to clear up the confusion in itself, by way of acquriing a distance towards what in it is not god himself but merely the ground of his [[existence ]] – that is by ejecting the ground from himself.” (tir 36)

This act can be [[identified ]] as analogous to the madness of hegel’s ‘night of the world’.

The subject (in this case god) is constituted by a loss, by the removal of itself from itself, by the [[expulsion ]] of the very ground or [[essence ]] from which it is made.The subject, in this [[sense]], is always a nostalgic subject, forever trying to recover its loss.

The subject maintains a relation of [[extimacy ]] towards itself; ‘extimacy’ is a mixture of the two words ‘external’ and ‘intimacy’; this [[external ]] intimacy or extimacy designates the way in which the core of the subject’s being is outside itself.

If this sounds a little difficult to conceptualize, it is perhaps easiest to think of it in analogy to your eyeball; you can see everything except the part of you that does the [[seeing ]] – your own eyeball. The only way you can see your eyeball isby [[looking ]] in a [[mirror ]] where it is outside of yourself. The subject is in an analogous positon to this: it is a perspective on reality which cannot be grasped in itself but only in the ‘mirror’ of reality.

“how, precisely, does the word [[discharge ]] the tension of the rotary motion, how does it mediate the [[antagonism ]] between the contractive and the expansive force? The word is a contraction in the guise of its very opposite, of an expansion – that is to say, in pronoucning a word, the subject contracts his being outside himself: he ‘coagulates’ the core of his being in an external [[sign]]. In ther ([[verbal]]) sign, i – as it were – find myself outside myself, i posit my [[unity ]] outside myslef, in a [[signifier ]] which represents me. (tir 43).

The real is the world before it is carved up by [[language]], the medium of the symbolic.God, at this [[stage]], is a purely [[self-relating ]] entity; he has no objective mooring for his being – everything is just subjective, or ‘inside’ him.“this god is not yet the creator, since in creation the being (the contraced reality) of an [[otherness ]] is posited that possesses a minmal self-consistency and exists outside its creator – this, however, i shwat god in the furty of his egotism is not prone to tolerate. (taof 17).

In susbtantially the same way, although we, as bodies, are sitllpart of the real, we, as symbolic [[subjects]], are also differentiated from it.

Subjectivization [[needs ]] to be conceived as a two-way process.On the one hand, the [[symbolic order]], or the big other, precedes us and speaks through us.For example, we might be [[born ]] into a [[family ]] and bear that family’s anme,occupy a specific socio-[[economic ]] postion, follow a particualr [[religion]], and so on.On the other hand, because the symbolic order is incomplete or constituted by a [[lack ]] (a lack which is the subject) the way in which we integrate these elements of the symbolic and narrate them to ourselves is ours.For example, we might disown our family and [[change ]] our [[name]], invent a nw religion, and so on.

“despite the fact that their most intimate [[memories ]] are not ‘true’ but only implanted, replicants subjectivize themselves by way of combining these memories into an individual [[myth]], a [[narrative ]] which allows them to construct their [[place ]] in the symbolic universe.” (twtn 41)

Reading schelling via [[lacan]]Once you have grasped the basic lacanisnconepts of the [[imaginary]], the symbolic and the real, ou will notice that in his [[philosophical ]] writings, such as in his [[discussion ]] of schelling, zizek always inerprets the [[work ]] of other philosophers in [[terms ]] of those [[concepts]].This is because, as he admitson several occasions, ‘the core of my entire work is the endeavor to use lacan as a privileged [[intellectual ]] tool to reactualize german idealism’ (tzr ix).This raises [[three ]] related questions: what is german [[idealism]], why does it need reactualizing, and what does ‘reactualizing’ mena?The term ‘german idealism’ designates the work of philosophers such as [[kant]], [[fichte]], schelling and heel.The [[reason ]] that zizek believes german idealism nees reactualizing is that he thinks we are taught to [[understand ]] it in one way, whereas he regards the turht of it to be soething else.The term ‘reactualizing’ refers to the fact that there are different possible ways to [[interpret ]] german idealism, and that zizek wishes to realize or make ‘actual’ one of those possibilities in [[distinction ]] to the way it is currently realized or ‘actualized’.

At its most basic, we tend to be taught that the german idealists though that the [[truth ]] of something could be found in itself.

We cannot look into our selves and find out who we truly are, we cannot [[gaze ]] into our own nvels, because who we truly are is always elsewhere.Our navels, as it were, are somehwere else in the symbolic formaitons whch always precede us and in the real which wehave to [[disavow ]] if we are to enter the symbolic in the first palce.

The reason that lacan occupies a privielges [[position ]] for zizek is that the key to his work can be found in the proposition that self-identity is [[impossible]].The identity of something, its singularity or ‘oneness’, is always [[split]].To put this in another way, there is always too much of something, an indivisible [[remainder]], or a bit left over whch means that it cannot be self-identical.

This principle of the [[impossibility ]] of self-identity is what informs zizek’s reading of all the german idealists, includingschelling.for [[instance]], as we have seen, the beginning is not actually thebeginning at all – the truth of the beginninglies elsewhere; it is split or not identical to itself.The subject of the [[enunciation ]] and the subject of the [[enunciated]]

The [[subject of the enunciated ]] is the ‘i’ of the [[sentence]], the [[grammatical ]] designation or pronoun used by all individuals.

The subject can only eneter language by negating the real, ‘murder’ or substituting the blood-and-sinew reality of self for the [[concept ]] of the self expressed in words – in anmes or pornouns, etc.