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SUBJECTIVITY VERSUS SUBJECTIVIZATION

by George Hartley

 

I will begin by distinguishing between subjectivity and subjectivization. Subjectivity for Lacan is the condition of the subject, the split-subject. Subjectivization, on the other hand, is the precondition for both Althusser’s subject of interpellation and the poststructuralist subject-position. The subject opens up the space for subjectivization. The subject for Lacan is not the result of ideological interpellation but is instead the abyss which makes way for that interpellation.

 

But what does it mean to speak of the abyss of subjectivity? The most basic moment here, of course, is the example of when I speak about myself: the I who speaks and the I who is spoken of can never occupy the same point—because of the nature of signification and language, I can never be identical to myself. An abyss separates the speaking I from the spoken I. But there is also the Hegelian sense of the abyss of subjectivity, a sense appropriate for Lacan as well: the subject of a proposition can never be adequate to its predicates. In other words, the subject is not a stable thing upon which its predicates depend for their existence. For example, when I say, “God is good,” the subject of the proposition, “God,” is presented as equivalent to its predicate, “good.” But for Hegel this proposition of equivalence or identity becomes through its very form a proposition of nonidentity. The “is” of the proposition separates subject and predicate, making their unity-in-identity forever impossible. The relationship between the words “God” and “good” is not one of identity but one of negation. To take another example, no existing democracy ever quite matches up to the concept of Democracy, and yet the concept itself is totally meaningless without these attributes. The predicates are never quite it, never quite good enough, and are thus constantly swallowed up into the vacuum of the subject. This is one sense in which, for Hegel as for Lacan, the subject is nothing but pure negativity. In psychoanalytic terms, the subject is nothing but the negativity at the heart of our traumatic confrontation with the Real, those points at which our experience of the world as meaningful breaks down.