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== The Cogito ==cogitoAdvanced 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(myers 33)The cogito and the post-structuralistsTwo way s of interpreting the cogito – the post-structuralist version and zizek’s version.For post-structuralists, the cogito is the basis of the centred subject, or the indivisible ‘individual’..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.Its main advantage is that nothing impinges upon the autonomy of the individual.Every person, as the saying goes, is an isalnd – self-sufficient, independent and free to do what it wills.The individual conceive in this way is uttterly subjective; everything remains within its dominion and subject to its control.There is no objecitvity at all.

The Introduction Against the background of Zizek' s The Ticklish Subject begins with his assertion this rampant subjectivism, then, it is perhaps not surprising that' philosophers (among them the post-structuralists) discerned the need for a spectre is haunting Western academiacorrective dose of objectivism. . ., In creating the spectre field of psychoanlaysis at the Cartesian subject' (TTS: 1). The Cartesian subjectbeginning the the twentieth century, or coBita as it freud’s disclosure of the unconscious demosntrated that much of our psychic life is also knowninaccessible and beyond our control.All of these developments, isalong with others, he proclaims, constantly liable help to attempts to exorcize it from contemporary thought by New Age obscurantists, postmodern deconstructionists, Habermasians, Heideggerians, cognitive scientists, Deep Ecologists, post-Marxists and feminists. In short, just about every reviles breach the cogito. Aficionados seemingly impervious usbjectivism of ZiZek' s contrary mode of thought willthe individaul, therefore, not showing it to be surprised subject to learn forces outside of itself, or else that, in opposition it belon to all these theoretical factions, he fully endorses the model of the Cartesian s~jecL All a world of which raises it was not the question: what is the coBita and why does everyone (except Zizek) seem to want done with it?center.

Although Post-structuralists reject the notion of the cogito with its associated individualism and advance in its stead the idea for it was originally proposed by Saint Augustine (354of the decentred subject.This subject is not an autonomous being with the power of self--430)determiantion but rather an effect of the structure of disocurse where competing discourses intersect and speak through the subject.In this way, one the meaning of the usubject is not inside or at the center of itself; instead the meaning of the founders subject is decentered or located outside of the Christian Churchsubject in the competing discourses, in, for example, the caBita in discourse of the form that we know it was first advanced unconscious or ideology.The subject is therefore determined or impelled by Rene Descartesthese discourses. It cannot determine itself but is subject to (1596or in a ‘subject positon’ to) the domiannt ideologies. “in ‘post-structuralism’, the subject is usually reduced to so-called subjectivation, he is conceived as an effect of a funamentally non-1650subjective process: the subject is always caught in, traversed by the pre-subjective process (of ‘writing’, of ‘desire’ and so on), and the emphasis is on the individuals’ different modes of ‘experiencing’, ‘living’ their positions as ‘subjects’, ‘actors’, ‘agents’ of the French philosopherhistorical process.” (soi 174).In other words, mathematician and soldier who the post-structuralist subject is often referred , as derrida argues, merely ‘a “function” of language’, a kind of symbolic automaton doomed to as ventriloquize the Father discourse of Modern Philosophythe big other. Descartes'starting point for Madness: the caBita was vanishing mediator between nature and cultureThe method of cartesian doubt affords us a cold winter's day. It was so icy that he climbed telling insight into a very large stove how we transform from being immersed in nature (or objectivity) to keep himself warm and stayed there all daybeings supported by culture (or subjectivity). During his confinement Descartes commenced upon thephilosophic procedure which How is named after him: Cartesian doubt. The point 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?Where does this procedure was to establish what could really be known.distance come from?

Descartes began by isolating The missing link between nature and culture is to be found in the process of cartesian doubt.Zizek describes the evidence process of his senses: was he really sitting cartesian doubt as a withdrawal into self – a withdrawal symbolized by a fire in descartes’s own physical withdrawal into the oven.Descartes cuts himself off from the world, systematically severing all links with his dressing gown? He concluded that environs until all he could not be sureis left with is the cogito. He had often dreamt of just such a scenario andIt is here, in his dreamthe gesture of total withdrawal, this had seemed real that zizek locates the hidden passage from nature to himculture. HoweverThis gesture is, even if the dream itself were an illusionfor zizek, what one of madness – the concepts employed by specific madness of hegel’s ‘night of the dreamworld’:“this night, the mathematical concepts such as shapeinner of anture, number and size which apparently match those of reality? Descartes concedes that although these may seem to be correctexists here – pure self – in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head – there is 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 possibility night that they are all the invention of an evil genius designed to fool himbecomes awful. If ” (catu 258)It is only when reality is eclipsed by this were ‘night of the world’, when the case thoughworld itself is experienced only as loss, Descartes argues that he could not be deceived if he did not exist in some form. Given that his body may be an illusionas absolute negativity, Descartes concludes that at the very least his thought must existis becomes possibile, and indeed necessary (if it we are to escape from madness), to construct a symbolic universe or a universe of culture.Descartes’s withdrawal-into-self is to be deceived:precisely such an experience of radical loss.

While I decided thus to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I who thought thus must be something; and observing that this truth: / think, therefore / am, was so certain and so evident that all Descartes’s cogito is not the most extravagant suppositions substantial ‘i’ of the sceptics were individual, but an empty point of negativity.This empty point of negativity is not capable ‘nothing’ but the oppsotie of shaking iteverything, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as or the first principle negation of all determinancy.It is in this empty space devoid of all content, that zizek locates the philosophy I was seekingsubject. The subject is, in other words, a void.

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 (Descartes 1968or 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.This gap, the gap between nature and the beings immersed in it, is the subject.The subject, in other words, is the missing link, or ‘vanishing mediator’, between the state of nature and the state of culture.Rather, the withdrawal-into-self which culimiantes in the cogito has to be presupposed as the vanishing mediator between the two, the missing link around which the tranistion is organized.We have to ‘get rid’ of the real before we can construct a substitute for it in the symbolic.This vanishing mediator is a passage through madnessMadness, therefore, is a prerequistie for sanity, that is, for the ‘normalcy’ of a civilized subject.The vanishing mediator(myers 37 -39)The birth of god: 53reading the cogito via schellingGerman philosopher fredrich wilhelm joseph von shelling (1775-541854).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.The origin of god is known from the gospel according to st john: “in the beginning was the world’.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).These drives are the ultimate ground (grund) of reality – the basis for everything.Nothing precedes them, except this ‘nothing’ itself, this abyss (or ungrund).

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.In the beginning (which is prior the the beginning) god is part of this freedom – he is not yet the individual being; he is a pure nothingness enjoying the state of non-being.Such contentment, however, contains the seeds of an inherent discontent. This phrase is because the blissful peace of pure freedom is based on the fact that it is an unassertive will which wants nothing.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)Wanting nothing and first principle - 'I thinkwanting ‘nothing’ are two sides of the same coin, contractions and expansions which constitue the rotary motion of drives which precede the beginning.The will that wants something is the positive, therifare I am' or 'coBitaexpansive will, erBa sum' - while the will that wants precisely nothing is what the term' caBita' designatesnegative, contracting will.The result is a recursive deadlock.

== The Cogito and God, in other words, is merely part of the Post-Structuralist ==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)

There are many ways of interpreting the caBita, but we are interested here The only in two - the post-structuralist version and Zizek's version. For the post-structuralists, way that god can establsih the caBita ground for his existence is the basis of the centred subject, orlike decartes, as it is more commonly knownby destroying all determinate content, by withdrawing from the 'individual'world, and as it is regarded by them as the spoilt brat of philosophy. T individualwere, as ‘by ejecting the name ~ggests,~ indivisib~eground from himslf’. In our day-to-day lives, we tend to think of ourselves This act can be identified as individual ause we feel we are com lete in charge o ourselves and not subject analogous to the whims 0 outside forces. When Descartes states 'I who thought thus must be something', we understand that 'I', the 'I' madness of the caBita, to be an individual. It is the 'I' that does the thinking - the thoughts belong to him rather than him to the thoughts. In other words, the 'I' hegel’s ‘night of the caBita is the master of itselfworld’. A!:.lndividual is therefore self-transparent - nothing impedes its understanding ‘god himself was “out of itself because it is In total control and his mind”’(taof 11); he has total autonomyto risk madness before he can exist.over its actions. There are no dark banana skins of the soul ~tO slip up the psyche, there are no words It is this lunacy which threaten to betray constitutes the meaning of their speaker, vanishing mediaotr between nothingness and there are no gusts of history which might suddenly blow the individual from its perch. The world of the individual is an immaculate, windless, danger-free environmentgod himself.

It If this sounds a little difficult to conceptualize, it is, therefore, 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 state mirror where it is outside of perfectionyourself. Its main advantage The subject is in an analogous positon to this: it is that nothing impinges upon a perspective on reality which cannot be grasped in itself but only in the autonomy ‘mirror’ of reality.From subject to subjectivizationThe subject is externalized in the word, which announces the individual. Every personbeginning:“how, precisely, as does the word discharge the tension of the saying goesrotary 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 island - self-sufficient, independent and free expansion – that is to do what it wills. Its main disadvantagesay, howeverin pronoucning a word, is that nothing impinges upon the autonomy subject contracts his being outside himself: he ‘coagulates’ the core of the individualhis being in an external sign. Every person is an island - self-sufficient In ther (verbal) sign, independent and free to do what i – as it willswere – find myself outside myself, i posit my unity outside myslef, in a signifier which represents me. (tir 43). In other wordsIf i find myself outside of myself, i am no longer self-identifical; the very features of the individual signifer which seem to confer upon it such blessings are also those which blight represents me is just that, a representation, but itis not actually me. This is because the individual conceived in this way is utterly subjective; everything remains within its dominion and If i am to be a subject to its control. There is no objectivity at all, i cannot avoid this irretrievable loss, for it is only on account of this loss that i actually become something rather than remain as nothing.

If this seems merely The process of subjecting ourselves to language and to the rest of the symbolic orer is subjectivization.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 philosophical problemspecific socio-economic postion, follow a particualr religion, and so on.On the other hand, because the consequences for this model symbolic order is incomplete or constituted by a lack (a lack which is the subject) the way in which we integrate these elements of subjectivity are equally compelling within 'reality' as wellthe symbolic and narrate them to ourselves is ours. For example, until recentlywe might disown our family and change our name, invent a nw religion, and so on.The gap in the symbolic means that we are not reducible to mere functions of the symbolic or automatons:“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)It is the replicants’ ability to create an individual story out of implanted memories that makes them seem human because that is exactly what we do too.We maintain our ability to integrate the elements of the symbolic in an individual way and it was generally accepted is the ‘self’ that does this, what he defines as the ‘centre of narrative gravity’ (by men at leastcatu 261).In other words, the self is what fills in the void of the subject, and while the subject never changes, the self is open to constant revision.Reading schelling via lacanOnce 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 only men were masters Df themselveszizek 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. WomenFor zizek, on the other hand, the fundamental insight of german idealism is that the truht of some thing is always outside itself.So, for example, the truth of our experience lies outside ourselves, in the symbolic and the real, rather than being buried deep within us.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 supposed , 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.For example, the meaning of a word can never be found in the word itself, but rather in other wrods.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 enunciatedThe subject of the enunciation is the ‘i’ who speaks, the individual doing the speaking;The subject of the enunciated is the ‘i’ of the sentence, the grammatical designation or pronoun used by all individuals.‘i’ is not identical to passions itself – it is split between the individual ‘i’ (the subject of enunciation) and feelings which they could the grammatical ‘i’ (the subject of the enunciated). 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. It is partly in the light of this that lacna is boldy able to refashion descartes’ ‘i think, therefore, i am’ as ‘i think where i am not, therefore i am where i do not properly controlthink’ (lacan 1977: 166). That The ‘i think’ here is the subject of the enunciated (the symbolic subjct), whereas the ‘i am’ is the subject of the enunciation (the real subject).What lacan aims to saydisclose by rewriting the catesian cogito in this way is that the subject is irrevocaly split, women were nottorn asunder by language.