Bad subjects: there is no big Other

Bad subjects: there is no big Other

However Žižek clearly overlooks parts of Butler’s work where she insists that to “unbind the law from the process of subjectivation” one needs to be a bad subject (On Anarchism 99). She further asks, “what are the possibilities of politicizing disidentifiction, this experience of misrecognition, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong?" (1993, 219) In his important Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses Althusser focuses on the interpellation of a subject by the big Other. Althusser’s theory of subject formation places the emphasis on a subject that conforms to the normative dictates of capital — she is hailed by the police officer and turns around.⁶⁷ What Butler does is stand Althusser on his head and read how interpellation could make for bad subjects.⁶⁸ In this respect, Butler cites Antigone’s ability to break with the symbolic, to insist uncategorically without compromising her desire. Antigone employs a catachrestic operation of making a tear in the symbolic, exposing the Real, that is, the deadlock immanent to the big Other. In her battle with Creon Antigone exposes the lack in the Other, the fact that the big Other is barred: the edicts of the State are in the last resort arbitrary and grounded in violence. Antigone seeks no support in the symbolic order, the big Other, she makes no effort to gain recognition in this space because what she seeks is heterogeneous to the prevailing rationality. But what does this mean if one is to bring this example closer to an understanding of a political event today? Firstly, it reveals that to be a subject is not something in which one is born; to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one is not born a subject, one emerges as a subject through an impossible act, and remaining firm, pursuing the consequences of this act to the end. A subject emerges as a result of an act. Prior to an act the human being is merely an individual, a strict utilitarian maximizer pursuing his/her pleasures. In other words, it is possible to live one’s entire life as a subject of desire, pursing and maximizing one’s interests according to a personal calculus of benefit/harm etc. But an ethical relation to the Other makes no concessions to this type of existence. In Groundhog Day, once Phil ceases to cater to a hysterical Che Vuoi plaguing him in the form of a constant question — Why are you saying this to me? Why is this happening to me? — and instead invokes an entirely different subjective position that is indifferent to the desire of the big Other, his subject position begins to shift.

It is thus only after assuming a fundamental indifference towards the Other’s desire, getting rid of the hysterical game of subjectivization, after suspending the intersubjective game of mutual (mis)recognition, that the pure subject emerges. (Žižek, 2011)

The important point to be noted here is to reject the false notion that first there is an individual, who then gets “subjectivized,” that is, interpellated as a subject. The idea that there is first an individual who gets hailed into a “subject position” and then that there are subsequently various subject positions that individuals occupy is false. The popular upshot of this is that an individual may then experience a conflict between his or her various subject positions, her subject position of “mother” and that of “career woman” for example. But we should keep in mind that when Butler quotes Nietzsche’s emphatic statement that there is “no doer behind the deed,” we should interpret this as saying that the subject is this very failure of interpellation. The subject is its own failure to signify. The emergence of the subject is its very failure. As opposed to the game of “subjectivation” and subject positions, Žižek wants to bring attention to the self-relating negativity that is the subject, the fact that failing to heed the interpellative call is this very minimal self-difference inherent to subjectivity, this out-of-jointness of the subject with itself.

The key is whether the subject holds true to this failure, remains in this space “between two deaths” between biological death and total symbolic death. The subject is thus a void, between two signifiers, it can never be completely exhausted by the signifier, it can never be One.⁶⁹ Thus the crux of the ethical relation for Žižek is not to construct an Other in its capacity for goodness, (a slippery signifier if there ever was one).

To recognize the Other is thus not primarily or ultimately to recognize the Other in a certain well-defined capacity (“I recognize you as . . . rational, good, lovable”), but to recognize you in the abyss of your very impenetrability and opacity. This mutual recognition of limitation thus opens up a space of sociality that is the solidarity of the vulnerable. (2005c, 138-139)

Intersubjectivity is not a relation of mutual recognition of each other’s positive ontic qualities. This would reduce intersubjectivity to a mirroring relationship that ends in bitter rivalry, jealousy, resentment and hate.⁷⁰ Instead, intersubjective recognition should be grounded in the void of subjectivity. It is only here where the necessary agency is located to propel the subject into an act that “clears the deck,” or “wipes the slate clean” in a manner of speaking. But what does this mean?

Striking out against oneself

In Groundhog Day, Phil breaks out of the cyclical repetition of the same, he breaches the Symbolic order by striking out against himself, which seems oddly counter-intuitive. But this can be seen as part of a materialist dialectic that is engaged in changing the coordinates of the situation. One needs to recognize that the standard reading of the Hegelian triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, i.e., starting out with a good, then opposing a bad, and then finding some synthesis in a magical aufgehoben that brings together good and bad, must be discarded as a simplistic reduction of the dialectic. Nor should one simply see in Hegel an absolute idealized version of ‘God’ who resolves all contradictions at a different higher level. Instead Hegel’s ‘synthesis’ of opposites, should be discarded for

an unheard-of third version: the way to resolve the deadlock is to engage oneself neither in fighting for the ‘good’ side against the ‘bad’ one, nor in trying to bring them together in a balanced ‘synthesis’, but in opting for the bad side of the initial either/or. Of course, this ‘choice of the worst’ fails, but in this failure it undermines the entire field of alternatives and thus enables us to overcome its terms. (Žižek cited in Bryant 2008, 2)

One thus opts for the worst solution in order to finally attain the significantly different solution. The worst option is required in order to ‘clear the deck’ which prepares the way for the initiation of the new. So for example in the 1994 movie Speed Keanu Reeves plays a police officer who partners with another officer, (Jeff Daniels) to apprehend a dangerous criminal. In one crucial scene Reeves finds himself face to face with a criminal who is armed and holding Reeves’ partner hostage (Fragile 150). Instead of dropping his gun as demanded by the criminal Reeves shoots his partner in the leg. This momentarily both shocks and confuses the criminal just long enough for Reeves to shoot the criminal and free his partner. In the Toni Morrison novel Beloved, Sethe, a slave, escapes to Cincinnati with her three children, but upon her impending recapture, she kills her oldest daughter by slicing her throat and tries to kill her other three children rather than return them to a life of slavery.⁷¹ Striking out against oneself thus changes the very coordinates of how the situation is to be understood, it creates its own criteria regarding how the situation will be judged retrospectively. One needs, in order to reconfigure or reorder the standard criteria by which a situation is judged, to choose or go through the bad choice first.