What Cuts Across the Subject, and What Remains

In his essay, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Lacan gives us a formula of what negativity means for a subject that is always out of joint with itself. Having written about this topic in relation to Hegel, I feel it’s important to highlight the intersection, both with philosophy and a more human take on lived conditions. The key points are that a subject never “knows” their condition until it has already announced itself to them, because language subtracts from nothing; and thus that literally embodying something—individually or collectively—is a way of (mis)recognizing oneself through the Other.

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Tags: across Cuts