The Indivisible Remainder (24)

Hysteria/the Subject vs. Subjectivization

From The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1996 & 2007). The following citations are from the 2007 edition.

pp. 163-165: Hysteria has to be comprehended in the complexity of its strategy, as a radically ambiguous protest against the Master's interpellation which simultaneously bears witness to the fact that the hysterical subject needs a Master, cannot do without a Master, so that there is no simple and direct way out. For that reason, one should also avoid the historicist pitfall of rejecting the notion of hysteria as belonging to a bygone era: the notion that today, borderline disturbances, not hysteria, are the predominant form of 'discontent' in our civilization. 'Borderline' is the contemporary form of hysteria, that is, of the subject's refusal to accept the predominant mode of interpellation whose agent is no longer the traditional Master but the 'expert knowledge' of the discourse of Science. In short, the shift from the classic form of hysteria to borderline disturbances is strictly correlative with the shift from the traditional Master to the form of Power legitimated by Knowledge.

A more than sufficient reason for maintaining the notion of hysteria is that the status of the subject as such is ultimately hysterical. That is to say, when Lacan asserts that the most succinct definition of the subject is 'that which is not an object', the apparent banality of this claim should not deceive us: the subject--in the precise psychoanalytic sense of the subject of desire--exists only in so far as the question remains open of what she is for the Other as an object, that is, I am a subject in so far as the radical perplexity persists as to the Other's desire, as to what the Other sees (and finds worthy of desire) in me. In other words, when Lacan claims that there is no desire without an object-cause, this does not amount to the banality according to which every desire is attached to its objective correlative: the 'lost object' which sets the subject's desire in motion is ultimately the subject herself, and the lack in question concerns her uncertainty as to her status for the Other's desire. In this precise sense, desire is always desire of the Other: the subject's desire is the desire to ascertain her status as the object of the Other's desire.

The status of the Lacanian 'Che vuoi?', 'What do you want?, is thus radically ambiguous. On the one hand, it emanates from the Other--that is to say, it stands for the question the big Other (the analyst) addresses to the (hysterical) subject whose desire is inconsistent and, as such, self-impeding: 'What do you actually want? Do you really want what you are saying you want?' On the other hand, 'Che vuoi?' articulates the perplexity of the subject himself confronted with an impenetrable Other who wants something from him, although the subject is never able to ascertain what this something actually is [....] I, the subject, never know what I really want, since the Other's desire remains forever an enigma to me....

That is the vicious circle of hysteria: on the one hand, hysteria is secondary, a reaction against interpellation, a failed interpellation, a rejection of the identity imposed on the subject by the predominant form of interpellation, a questioning of this identity ('Am I really what you're saying I am?'); at another, more fundamental level, however, hysteria is primary, it articulates the radical, constitutive uncertainty as to what, as an object, I am for the other; and the symbolic identity conferred on me by interpellation is a response, a way out of the deadlock of hysteria. In other words, one could say that hysteria expresses the feminine subject's refusal of the predominant patriarchal symbolic order, the questioning of the authority of the Name-of-the-Father; however, one should simultaneously assert that this symbolic paternal authority itself emerges in order to render invisible, to 'gentrify', the impasse of hysteria. Or--to put it even more pointedly--it is not that "Woman doesn't exist' because, on account of patriarchal 'repression' she is not allowed to express herself freely and constitute her full symbolic identity, but, rather, the other way around--patriarchal symbolic authority emerges in order to 'gentrify' the scandal of 'Woman doesn't exist', to constrain the feminine subject to a determinate place in the symbolic structure. [....] Lacan's 'Woman doesn't exist' means that, precisely, 'woman' cannot be constructed: 'woman' is an entity whose symbolic construction necessarliy fails, in opposition to 'man', who does exist--that is, who can be constructed (in the logical sense of the term, since there is a limit, an exception, which allows for this construction). Lacan's point, of course, is that this 'less' is 'more': the claim that 'woman' cannot be constructed equals the claim that the status of the subject is feminine--that which eludes logical construction, the reef of impossibility at which symbolic construction fails, is precisely the subject qua $, the lack of the signifying chain.