Decentered subject Furthermore, one should insist here on the ambiguity of Hegel’s basic claim that the subject “recognizes itself in the Other”: we can read it as the formula of the narcissistic reappropriation of the Other (the subject swallows the Other, depriving it of its apparent autonomy), but also in a more literal way as that of recognizing oneself as “decentered,” as a moment of the self-mediation of an irreducible Otherness. Read this way, Hegel implicitly answers here the critique formulated by Habermas and others according to which the Hegelian Absolute remains “monological,” playing with itself and admitting no intersubjectivity proper. The subject not only has to share the central space with other subjects, it is in itself “decentered” in the sense that its rise is an effect of the inconsistency/antagonism of the substantial Other. But how? François Balmès pointed out the path when he claimed that “STRUCTURE IS WHAT ALLOWS US TO THINK THE SUBJECT’S CONSTITUTION, since, in the real, the subject is a structure’s effect. It follows that this question of the subject’s constitution is, for sure, subversive with regard to the philosophical tradition concerning the subject. In that tradition, this question has no sense, since the subject is its ultimate condition, so that one cannot derive it from anything else—although it is possible for the subject to emerge to itself in a history, as is the case with Hegel and in Hegelianizing readings of wo es war.” What this means is that we should leave behind the stale old topic of “structure versus the subject”: Lacan rejects the Sartrean notion of structure as the “reified” residue of the living subject’s productive activity, as well as the contrary Lévi-Straussian notion of subjective experience as an illusory surface effectively regulated by objective structural networks. The question nonetheless remains: how are we to think the structure so that the subject emerges from it? Lacan’s answer is: as an inconsistent, non-All, symbolic structure articulated around a constitutive void/impossibility. More precisely, the subject emerges through the structure’s own reflective self-relating which inscribes into the structure itself its constitutive lack—this inscription WITHIN the structure of what is constitutively EXCLUDED from it is “the signifier which represents the subject for other signifiers.” Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, Verso, 2014, ebook, chap.5
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 02:03:13 +0000
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