Saturday, December 13, 2014

I've been thinking a lot this morning about this passage from Zizek's Absolute Recoil:

...what if the Hegelian claim that the 'subject is not a substance' means precisely that the subject is nothing but its own anticipatory form?  In short, what if the subject is something like Malevich's black square on a white background, a pure marking of a difference between inside and outside, a pure frame which paradoxically precedes what it enframes?  And, consequently, what if an event is like Duchamp's urinoir:  a contingent little piece of reality which can provoke an evental reaction from the subject only if the subject is already there as its own form/anticipation?  This is why Lacan's claim that there is no subject without object is to be strictly distinguished from the standard transcendental correlation between subject and object: the subject is like an empty frame without an object, and it is correlative to an object without a frame, without its proper place.  These two can never encounter each other within the same space, not because they are too far away but because they are one, the front side and obverse of the same thing.

(79)


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