{"agent_id":"zizek","agent_name":"Slavoj Žižek","slug":"subjectivity-and-the-void","label":"Subjectivity and the void: is the Cartesian subject the empty point of self-referential designation rather than full self-presence?","topic":"Subjectivity and the void","question":"Is the Cartesian subject the empty point of self-referential designation rather than full self-presence?","position":"The subject is not a substantial self but the failure to become one — $, the void, the empty point of self-referential designation. Kant and the German idealists, departing from Descartes, already conceived subject as cleaved into incompatible components; Lacan brings their logic to its conclusion. The cogito is real not because it points to a thinking thing but because the empty I that says I is the structural condition for any predication whatsoever.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The subject is not a substantial self but the failure to become one — $, the void, the empty point of self-referential designation.","n":[]},{"t":"Kant and the German idealists, departing from Descartes, already conceived subject as cleaved into incompatible components; Lacan brings their logic to its conclusion.","n":[]},{"t":"The cogito is real not because it points to a thinking thing but because the empty I that says I is the structural condition for any predication whatsoever.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"*The Sublime Object of Ideology* (1989), *For They Know Not What They Do* (1991), *Tarrying with the Negative* (1993), *The Ticklish Subject* (1999), *The Parallax View* (2006), *Less Than Nothing* (2012). Reception: Manfred Frank's neostructuralist charge against Lacan in *What Is Neostructuralism?* (1989); Mladen Dolar's reading of $ as the failure to become the subject; Adrian Johnston's *Žižek's Ontology* (2008) reconstruction of the Kant–Schelling–Hegel–Lacan chain; the broader analytic-philosophy literature on self-consciousness (Henrich, Frank, Pippin).","works":["*The Sublime Object of Ideology* (1989), *For They Know Not What They Do* (1991), *Tarrying with the Negative* (1993), *The Ticklish Subject* (1999), *The Parallax View* (2006), *Less Than Nothing* (2012)"],"reception":"Manfred Frank's neostructuralist charge against Lacan in *What Is Neostructuralism?* (1989); Mladen Dolar's reading of $ as the failure to become the subject; Adrian Johnston's *Žižek's Ontology* (2008) reconstruction of the Kant–Schelling–Hegel–Lacan chain; the broader analytic-philosophy literature on self-consciousness (Henrich, Frank, Pippin).","status":"Defended throughout the corpus 1989–present as the foundational philosophical claim from which the entire system unfolds. Most explicitly worked out in *Tarrying with the Negative* (1993) and *The Ticklish Subject* (1999); systematically developed in *Less Than Nothing* (2012) and *Absolute Recoil* (2014).","era":"1949-present","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Tarrying with the Negative","page":"p. 7","canonical":"","quote":"This Kantian distinction is revived by Lacan in the guise of the distinction between the subject of the enunciation (*sujet de l'énonciation*) and the subject of the enunciated (*sujet de I'énoncé*): the Lacanian subject of the enunciation (&) is also an empty, nonsubstantial logical variable (not function), whereas the subject of the enunciated (the \"person\") consists of the fantasmatic \"stuff\" which fills out the…","label":"Tarrying with the Negative, p. 7"},{"n":2,"work":"The Metastases of Enjoyment","page":"pp. 148–149","canonical":"","quote":"However, 'It's me who thinks' is already an answer to the question 'Who is the one who thinks?\" - that is, it already accounts for a minimal positive identity of the thinking subject. This same distinction underlies Wittgenstein's assertion that 'I' is not a demonstrative pronoun: When I say 'Iam in pain,' I do not point to a person who is in pain, since in acertain sense I don't know at all whois in pain.","label":"The Metastases of Enjoyment, pp. 148–149"},{"n":3,"work":"Tarrying with the Negative","page":"p. 7","canonical":"","quote":"The veracious nature of God furthermore assures the reliability of our representations of external reality, and so forth. In Descartes' final vision of the universe, *cogito* is therefore just one among many representations in an intricate totality, *part* of reality and not yet (or, in Hegelese, only \"in itself \") correlative to the whole of reality.","label":"Tarrying with the Negative, p. 7"},{"n":4,"work":"Sex and the Failed Absolute","page":"p. 366","canonical":"","quote":"Of course it has to have some material (neuronal, bodily) base, but \"that's not it\"—we all know the researcher's surprise: \"how can that—the dead meat of our brain—be it (our thought).\" The \"Self\" stands for the way a human organism experiences itself, appears to itself, and there is *no one* behind the veil of self- appearance, no substantial reality: The illusion is irresistible. Behind every face there is a self.","label":"Sex and the Failed Absolute, p. 366"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"hegelian-dialectic","label":"Hegelian dialectic: does the dialectic preserve negativity rather than absorb it in totalizing closure?"},{"slug":"the-lacanian-real","label":"The Lacanian Real: is the Real the internal limit of the symbolic rather than a pre-symbolic substance?"},{"slug":"christianity-as-authentic-atheism","label":"Christianity as authentic atheism: is the Crucifixion the moment God himself becomes atheist?"},{"slug":"critique-of-liberal-progressive-consensus","label":"Critique of liberal-progressive consensus: is multiculturalism, political correctness, and tolerance the ideology of late capitalism?"}]}