Table Of ContentSubjectivity and Otherness
Short Circuits
Slavoj Zˇizˇek, editor
The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity,by Slavoj Zˇizˇek
The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two,by Alenka Zupancˇicˇ
Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud,by Jerry Aline Flieger
Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK,by Alexei Monroe
The Parallax View,by Slavoj Zˇizˇek
A Voice and Nothing More,by Mladen Dolar
Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan,by Lorenzo Chiesa
Subjectivity and Otherness
A Philosophical Reading of Lacan
Lorenzo Chiesa
TheMITPress Cambridge,Massachusetts London,England
© 2007Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or me-
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chiesa, Lorenzo.
Subjectivity and otherness : a philosophical reading of Lacan / Lorenzo Chiesa.
p. cm.—(Short circuits)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-53294-5(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Lacan, Jacques, 1901‒1981. 2. Subjectivity. 3. Other (Philosophy) I. Title.
BF109.L23C45 2007
150.19'5092—dc22
2006029831
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Series Foreword vii
INTRODUCTION 2
I The Subject of the Imaginary (other)
1 THE SUBJECT OFTHE IMAGINARY (OTHER) 12
1.1 Introduction: The Subject and the Ego 13
1.2 “Je est un autre”: The (De)formative Function of the Image
and the Mirror Stage 14
1.3 Hainamoration,Ideal Ego and Ego-Ideal 19
1.4 Consciousness, the Unconscious, and the Complexes 26
II The Subject of the Symbolic (Other)
2 THE UNCONSCIOUS STRUCTURED LIKE A LANGUAGE 34
2.1 Introduction: From the Small to the Big Other 35
2.2 The Function of Speech 37
2.3 The Notion of Message 41
2.4 Signifier, Signified, Letter 46
3 OEDIPUS AS A METAPHOR 60
3.1 Introduction: Entering the Symbolic 61
3.2 The Mythical State before Frustration, and
Primordial Frustration 65
3.3 The Dialectic of Frustration, or, the First (“Pre-Oedipal”)
Stage of the Oedipus Complex 67
3.4 The Second and Third Stages of the Oedipus Complex 75
3.5 Sexuation and the Feminine Oedipus Complex 82
3.6 The Paternal Metaphor, the Name-of-the-Father,
and the Phallus 88
3.7 The Oedipus Complex and the Birth of the Unconscious 96
III The Subject of the Real (Other)
4 THERE IS NO OTHER OFTHE OTHER 104
4.1 Introduction 105
4.2 From “There Is an Other of the Other’’... 107
4.3 ... to “There Is No Other of the Other” 115
4.4 What Is the “Real”? 125
5 THE SUBJECT OFTHE FANTASY . . .AND BEYOND 140
5.1 The Subject of the Fantasy and the Function of the Death Drive:
An Overview 141
5.2 The Subject of the Fantasy and Desire 151
5.3 The Subject of the Fantasy and the Object a 156
5.4 Pure Desire, Jouissance,and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis 167
5.5 J’ouïs-sens, Jouis-sens, Jouis-sans 183
Notes 193
Series Foreword
A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network—faulty, of
course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock
of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is
not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually
touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion) and read it in a short-circuiting
way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus (“minor”
should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense: not “of lesser quality,” but margin-
alized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a “lower,” less dig-
nified topic)? If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to
insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions. This
is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion (short-circuiting
philosophical speculation through the lens of political economy, that is to say,
economic speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality
(short-circuiting the highest ethical notions through the lens of the unconscious
libidinal economy). What such a reading achieves is not a simple “desublima-
tion,” a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or li-
bidinal cause; the aim of such an approach is, rather, the inherent decentering of
the interpreted text, which brings to light its “unthought,” its disavowed presup-
positions and consequences.
And this is what “Short Circuits” wants to do, again and again. The underlying
premise of the series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a privileged instrument of
such an approach, whose purpose is to illuminate a standard text or ideological
formation, making it readable in a totally new way—the long history of Lacanian
interventions in philosophy, religion, the arts (from the visual arts to the cinema,
music, and literature), ideology, and politics justifies this premise. This, then, is
d
r
o
not a new series of books on psychoanalysis, but a series of “connections in the
w
e Freudian field”—of short Lacanian interventions in art, philosophy, theology, and
r
o ideology.
f
“Short Circuits” intends to revive a practice of reading which confronts a clas-
s
e
sic text, author, or notion with its own hidden presuppositions, and thus reveals
i
r
e its disavowed truth. The basic criterion for the texts that will be published is that
s they effectuate such a theoretical short circuit. After reading a book in this series,
the reader should not simply have learned something new: the point is, rather, to
make him or her aware of another—disturbing—side of something he or she
knew all the time.
Slavoj Zˇizˇek
Subjectivity and Otherness
