SUBJECT BEFORE SUBJECTIVATION

Abstract

Today, in the process of the dissolution of Marxism and formation of »post-Marxism«, we have three dominating concepts of subject, each of them implying a certain ethical attitude: the Habermasian subject of the language-reflection entailing the ideal of the communication without constraint; the »post-structuralist« pluralism of subject-positions which is, at least in Foucault's work, connected to an ethics of the invention of the Self; the Althusserian subject as an effect of the imaginary misrecognition, implying the ethics of the subjective destitution. Lacan's psychoanalytic theory offers us a fourth paradigm, irreducible to the other three: already before the process of subjectivation, of ideological interpelation, the subject is present as the void, the impossibility of the symbolic structure, as the correlative to the real kernel resisting symbolisation. This corresponds with an ethics of the real, an ethics insisting on the distance separating the traumatism of the real from the efforts of its symbolisation. Laclau's and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is the first essay to elaborate a theory of the social field taking into account the Lacanian concepts: society is conceived as an impossible totality, structured around a certain traumatic kernel (»antagonism«). The critical examination of the notion of antagonism indicates that the concept of the subject corresponding to Laclau's and Mouffe's theory of the Social is the Lacanian sujet barré.