Subjectivity and the void: is the Cartesian subject the empty point of self-referential designation rather than full self-presence?

Slavoj Žižek, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.1234

Sources

  1. 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…
    Tarrying with the Negative, p. 7
  2. 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.
    The Metastases of Enjoyment, pp. 148–149
  3. 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.
    Tarrying with the Negative, p. 7
  4. 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.
    Sex and the Failed Absolute, p. 366

Where the argument is made

  • 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)

How the argument was received

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).