Infinitization of the Subject

Abstract

Traditionally, emancipatory politics is a question of knowing which parts of society are capable of counting for something, and which ones are not. Formulating the question of emancipatory politics in terms of existence, more specifically, in terms of “political subjects who are not social groups but rather forms of inscriptions of the count of the uncounted” (Rancière), means acknowledging that the proper place for emancipatory politics is the very terrain in which the system of domination operates, a system that radical political theorists characterize as a system of placement, identification, or counting. At present, however, this question of counting the uncountable, crucial for emancipatory politics, cannot be raised at all to the extent that globalization means that everybody is always already included, the exclusion of the uncounted is necessarily obscured, indeed, it has become invisible. Beginning with a discussion on an enigmatic remark: “the infinitization of the value of the subject”, taken from Lacan’s Seminar The Four Fundamental concepts of Psycho-analysis, this paper examines a conceptual shift in the articulation of the relation between the subject and the figures of the Other in an epoch of the Other which does not exist. Taking as her point of departure Lacan’s theory of the cut, the author shows how, in an era of the “generalized metonymization”, only an act constitutes a way out of a discourse that knows no closure.