Slavoj Žižek 
THE SUBJECT BEFORE SUBJECTIVATION 
The theme of this colloquium is Habermas. As an avowed dogmatic Laca-
nian, I will of course start with the question of the relation between Habermas 
and Lacan as it is developed in the Habermas' book which specifically addresses 
the issue of the so-called »post-structuralism« : Der philosophische Diskurs der 
Moderne (cf. Habermas 1985). There is a curious detail concerning Lacan's 
name: it is mentioned five times — I will quote all five places: p. 70 — »von 
Hegel und Marx bis Nietzsche und Heidegger, von Bataille und Lacan bis Fou-
cault und Derrida«; p. 120 — »Bataille, Lacan und Foucault«; p. 311 — »mit 
Lévi-Strauss und Lacan« ; p. 313 — »den zeitgenössischen Strukturalismus, die 
Ethnologie von Lévi-Strauss und die Lacansche Psychoanalyse« ; p. 359 — »von 
Freud oder C. G. Jung, von Lacan oder Lévi-Strauss« (!). Lacanian theory isn't 
then perceived as a specific entity, it is — to use a term of Laclau and Mouffe 
(L/M) — always articulated in a series of equivalences. Why this refusal to 
confront Lacan directly, in a book which includes lengthy discussions of Ba-
taille, Derrida and above all, Foucault, the real partner of Habermas? The 
answer to this enigma is to be found in another curiosity of the Habermas' 
book, in a curious accident with Althusser. Of course, I'm using here the term 
»curious accident« in Sherlock-Holmsian sense: Althusser's name isn't even 
mentioned in Habermas' book, and that's the curious accident. So, my first 
thesis would be that the great debate occupying the foreground of today's 
intellectual scene, the Habermas-Foucault debate, is masking another opposi-
tion, another debate which is theoretically more far-reaching: the Althusser-
Lacan debate. There is something enigmatic in a sudden eclipse of the Althus-
serian school: it cannot be explained away in terms of a theoretical defeat or 
even insinuations concerning his private life (the serious mistakes of Althusser, 
to use the good old Stalinist euphemism) — it is more as if there was in Al-
thusser's theory a traumatic kernel which had to be quickly forgotten, re-
pressed; it's an effective case of theoretical amnesia. 
Why is it then that the opposition Althusser-Lacan was replaced, in a 
kind of metaphorical substitution, by the opposition Habermas-Foucault? I will 
try to approach this issue from the perspective of the different ethical positions 
and at the same time, different notions of the subject that these four theories 
are implying. 
* 
86 Vestnik IMS, 1988/1 
With Habermas, we have the ethics of the unbroken communication, the 
Ideal of the universal, transparent intersubjective community; the notion of 
the subject behind it is, of course, the philosophy-of-language-version of the 
old subject of the transcendental reflection. With Foucault, we have a turn 
against that universalist ethics which results in a kind of esthetization of 
ethics: each subject must, without any support from universal rules, build 
his own mode of self-mastering, he must harmonize the antagonism of the 
powers within himself, so to speak invent himself, produce himself as subject, 
find his own particular art of living — that 's why Foucault was so fascinated 
by marginal life-styles constructing their particular mode of subjectivity (the 
sado-masochistic homosexual universe, for example). (Cf. Foucault 1984.) It is 
not so difficult to detect how this Foucaultian notion of subject enters the 
humanist-elitist traditon: its closest realisation would be the Renaissance ideal 
of the »all-round personality« mastering the passions within himself and mak-
ing out of his own life a work of art. Foucault's notion of the subject is rather 
a classical one: subject as the power of self-mediation and harmonizing the 
antagonistic forces, as a way of mastering the »use of pleasures« through a 
restoration of the image of self. Habermas and Foucault are here the two sides 
of the same coin — the real break is represented by Althusser, by his insistence 
on the fact that a certain cleft, a certain fissure, misrecognition, characterizes 
the human condition as such, i. e. by his thesis that the idea of the possible 
end of ideology is an ideological idea par excellence. (Cf. Althusser 1965.) 
Although Althusser hasn't writ ten a lot about ethical problematics, it is 
clear that the whole of his work embodies a certain radical ethical attitude 
which we might call the heroism of alienation or of subjective destitution: 
the point is not just that we must unmask the structural mechanism which is 
producing the effect of subject as ideological misrecognition, but that we must 
at the same time fully acknowledge this misrecognitions as unavoidable, i. e. 
that we must accept a certain delusion as a condition of our historical activity, 
of assuming a role as agent of historical process. In this perspective, the subject 
as such is constituted through a certain misrecognition: the process of ideo-
logical interpelation through which the subject »recognizes« itself in the calling 
up as the addressee of the ideological Cause implies necessarily a certain short-
circuit, an illusion of the type of »1 already was there« which, as was pointed 
out by Michel Pécheux (cf. Pécheux 1975), who has given us the most elabo-
rated version of the theory of interpelation, isn't without its comical effects — 
the short-circuit of »no wonder you were interpelated as proletarian, when you 
are a proletarian«. Here, Pécheux is supplementing Marxism with Marx-
brothers whose well-known joke is »You remind me of Emanuel Ravelli. — 
But I am Emanuel Ravelli. — Then no wonder that you look like him!« I my-
self once experienced this kind of stupidity when I was obliged to phone some-
body in the name of my father and presented myself: »It's me speaking, I'm 
the son of my father!« This was the point of my subjectivation. 
In contrast to the Althusserian ethics of alienation, we may determine the 
ethics implied by Lacanian psychoanalysis as that of separation. The famous 
Lacanian motto not to give way to our desire (ne pas céder sur son désir), 
is aimed at the fact that we must not obliterate the distance separating the 
real from its symbolisation. (Cf. Lacan 1973.) The best way to explain this would 
be to articulate its opposition the traditional Marxist notion of social antago-
nism. This traditional notion implies two interconnected features: 1. there 
Slavoj Žižek: The Subject beiore Subjectivation 87 
exists a certain fundamental antagonism possesing an ontological priority to 
»mediate« all other antagonisms, determining their place and their specific 
weight (class antagonism, economic exploitation); 2. historical development is 
bringing about, if not a necessity, at least an »objective possibility« of solving 
this fundamental antagonism and, in this way, mediating all other antago-
nisms — to recall the well-known Marxist formulation, the same logic which 
drove mankind into alienation and class division, is also creating the condition 
for its abolition — »die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur, der sie schlug /the 
wound can be healed only by the spear which made it/«, as Wagner, Marx's 
contemporary, was already saying, through the mouth of Parsifal. It is upon 
the unity of these two features that the Marxist notion of the revolution, of 
the revolutionary situation is founded: a situation of metaphorical condensation 
in which it finally becomes clear to the everyday consciousness that it is not 
possible to solve any particular question without solving them all, i. e. without 
solving the fundamental question which is embodying the antagonistic character 
of the social totality. In a »normal«, pre-revolutionary state of things, every-
body is fighting his own particular battles (the workers are striking for better 
wages, feminists are fighting for the rights of women, democrats for political 
and social freedoms, the ecologists against the exploitation of nature, partici-
pants in the peace-movements against the war-danger, etc.). Marxists are 
using all the skill and cleverness of their argumentation to convince the parti-
cipants of these particular struggles that the only real solution to their problem 
is to be found in the global revolution: as long as social relations are dominated 
by Capital, there will always be sexism in relations between the sexes, there 
will always be a threat of global war, there will always be a danger that po-
litical and social freedoms will be suspended, nature itself will always remain 
an object of ruthless exploitation . . . (the last heroic and rather desperate at-
tempt of such a totalisation is to be found in Perry Anderson's In the Tracks 
of Historical Materialism — cf. Anderson 1985). The global revolution will 
than abolish the fundamental social antagonism, enabling the formation of 
a transparent, rationally governed society. 
The basic feature of so-called »post-Marxism» is, of course, the break with 
this logic which, by the way, has not necessarily a Marxist connotation: almost 
any of the antagonisms which, in the light of Marxism, appear to be secondary, 
can take over this essential role of being the mediator of all the others. We 
have, for example, feminist fundamentalism (no global liberation without the 
emancipation of women, without the abolition of sexism), democratic funda-
mentalism (democracy as the fundamental value of western civilisation — all 
other struggles (economic, feminist, minorities, etc.) are just further applica-
tions of the basic democratic-egalitarian principle), ecological fundamentalism 
(ecological deadlock as the fundamental problem of mankind), and — why 
not? — also psychoanalytical fundamentalism as was articulated in Marcuse's 
Eros and Civilisation (the key to liberation lies in changing the repressive 
libidinal structure: cf. Marcuse 1955). 
In contrast to this essentialist perspective, »post-Marxism« affirms the 
irreducible plurality of the particular struggles — their articulation into a series 
of equivalences depends always on radical contingency of the social-historical 
process. But this is not enough — I think that the real counterpoint to Marxism 
is developed only in the Lacanian reading of psychoanalysis. Let's take the 
Freudian notion of the »death drive«. Of course, we have to abstract Freud's 
88 Vestnik IMS, 1988/1 
biologism: »death drive« is not a biological fact but a notion indicating that 
the human psychic apparatus is subordinated to a blind automatism of re-
petition beyond pleasure-seeking, self-preservation of life, accordance between 
man and his milieu. Man is — Hegel dixit — »an animal sick to death«, an 
animal extorted by an insatiatable parasite (reason, logos, language). In this 
perspective, the »death drive«, this dimension of radical negativity, cannot be 
reduced to an expression of alienated social conditions, it defines la condition 
humaine as such: there is no solution, no escape f rom it, the thing to do is 
not to »overcome«, to »abolish«, it, but to come to terms with it, to learn to 
recognize it in its terrifying dimension, and then, on the basis of this funda-
mental recognition, to try to articulate a modus vivendi with it. All »culture« 
is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize, precisely to 
cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism through 
which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with the animal homeostasis. 
It's not only that the aim is no longer to abolish this drive-antagonism, but 
the aspiration to abolish it is precisely the source of totalitarian temptation: 
the greatest mass murders and holocausts were always done in the name of 
Man as harmonious being, of a New Man without antagonistic tension. 
We have the same logic with ecology: man as such is »the wound of na-
ture«, there is no return to the natural balance, to accordance with his milieu, 
the only thing to do is to accept fully this cleft, fissure, this structural rooting 
out of man, and to try as far as possible to patch things af terwards; all other 
solutions — the illusion of a possible return to Nature, the idea of a total 
socialisation of nature — are a direct path to totalitarianism. — We have the 
same logic with feminism: »there isn't any sexual relationship«, i. e. the re-
lation between sexes is per definitionem »impossible«, an antagonistic one, 
there is no final solution, and the only foundation for the somewhat bearable 
relation between the sexes in an acknowledgement of this basic antagonism, 
of this basic impossibility. — We have the same logic with democracy: it is — 
to use the worn out phrase of Churchill — the worst of all possible systems, 
the only problem is that there isn't any other which would be better, i. e. de-
mocracy as such always entails the possibility of corruption, of the rule of 
the dull mediocrity, the only problem is that every attempt to elude this risk 
inherent in democracy and to restore »real« democracy, necessarily brings 
about its opposite, i. e. it ends in the abolition of democracy itself. By the way, 
here it would be possible to defend a thesis that the first post-Marxist was 
none other than Hegel himself: his thesis is precisely that the antagonism of 
civil society cannot be supressed without a fall into totalitarian terrorism — 
the state can only afterwards limit its disastrous effects. 
It is the merit of L/M (cf. Laclau/Mouffe 1985) that they have, with their 
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, developed a theory of the social field founded 
on such a notion of antagonism, i. e. on an acknowledgement of an original 
»traumatism«, an impossible kernel which resists symbolisation, totalisation, 
symbolic integration. Every attempt at symbolisation/totalisation comes after-
wards: it is an attempt to suture an original cleft, an attempt which is, in 
the last resort, per definitionem doomed to fail. Their accent is precisely that 
we must not be »radical« in the sense of aiming at a radical solution: we al-
ways live in an interspace and in borrowed time, every solution is provisional 
and temporary, a kind of postponing of a fundamental impossibility. So it 
seems to me that their title »radical democracy« is to be taken somehow para-
Slavoj Žižek: The Subject beiore Subjectivation 89 
doxically: it is precisely NOT »radical« in a sence of pure, true democracy, 
its radical character implies, on the contrary, that we can save democracy only 
by taking into account its own radical impossibility. Here we can see how we 
have reached the other end of the traditional Marxist standpoint: in traditional 
Marxism, the global solution-revolution is the condition of the effective solu-
tion of all particular problems, while here every provisional, temporarily suc-
cessful solution of a particular problem entails an acknowledgement of the 
global radical deadlock, impossibility, an acknowledgement of a fundamental 
antagonism. 
Now, my question here is, as with Althusser: which is the notion of the 
subject corresponding to this ethical position implying an acknowledgement of a 
radical deadlock, »antagonism«, proper to the human condition as such? The 
answer is that, in contrast to all above-mentioned positons, Lacan introduces 
a discontinuity, a fissure between the subject and the subjectivation: the subject 
is prior to subjectivation (in contrast to identity, which is a result of indenti-
fication). Far f rom being the result of the process of subjectivation = inter-
pelation = identification, the subject is precisely what is being masked by 
the process: the stake, the function of this process is to conceal the basic 
dimesion of the subject. 
* 
Precisely concerning this Lacanian notion of the subject, I would like to 
make a remark on L/M which is more a supplement that a criticism. My main 
idea is that the notion of the subject used in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy 
is not on the level of the crucial notion of antagonism proposed by L/M, and 
the reason for this is a certain lack of clarity in the notion of antagonism itself. 
In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, we even have a certain regression 
from Laclau's previous book Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (cf. Lac-
lau 1977): in this book we find a finely elaborated Althusserian theory of 
interpelation, while Hegemony offers us just a kind of vague reference to 
the post-structuralist notion of the »subject-positions«. Why this regression? 
My optimistic reading of it is that it is — to use again the good old Stalinist 
expression — »a dizziness from too much success«, an effect of the fact that 
L/M had progressed to quickly, i. e. that, with the elaboration of their concept 
of antagonism, they have accomplished such a radical breaktrough that it 
wasn't posible for them to follow it immediately with a corresponding concept 
of subject — hence the uncertainty regarding the subject in Hegemony. 
L/M are basically still conceiving the subject in a way that characterises 
»post-structuralism«, as an effect of the ideological interpelation, from the 
perspective of assuming different »subject-positions«. The main thrust of their 
argumentation is directed against the classical notion of the Subject as a sub-
stantial, essential entity, given in advance, dominating the social process and 
not being produced by the contingency of the discoursive process itself: 
against this notion, they aff irm that what we have is a series of particular 
subject-positions (feminist, ecologist, democratic. . .) the signification of which 
is not fixed in advance: it changes according to the way they are articulated 
in a series of equivalences through the metaphoric surplus which defines the 
identity of everyone of them. Let us take, for example, the series feminism-
democracy-peace movement-ecologism: insofar as the participant in the struggle 
for democracy »finds out by experience« that there is no real democracy with-
90 Vestnik IMS, 1988/1 
out the emancipation of women, insofar as the participant in the ecological 
struggle »finds out by experience« that there is no real reconciliation with 
nature without abandoning the aggressive-masculine attitude towards nature, 
insofar as the participant in the peace-movement »finds out by experience« 
that there is no real peace without radical démocratisation, etc., that is to say, 
insofar as the identity of each of the four above-mentioned positions is marked 
with the metaphorical surplus of the other three positions, we can say that 
something like an unified subject-position is being constructed: to be a demo-
crat means at the same time to be a feminist, etc. What we must not overlook 
is, of course, that such an unity is always radically contingent, the result of 
a symbolic condensation, and not an expression of some kind of internal ne-
cessity according to which the interests of all the above-mentioned positions 
would in the long run »objectively convene«. It is quite possible, for example, 
to imagine an ecological position which sees the only solution in a strong anti-
democratic, authoritarian state resuming control over the exploitation of na-
tural resources, etc. 
Now, it is clear that such a notion of the subject-positions still enters the 
frame of the Althusserian ideological interpelation as constitutive of the sub-
ject: the subject-position is a mode of how we recognize our position of an 
(interested) agent of the social process, how we experience our commitment 
to a certain ideological Cause. My idea is that we have to supplement this 
notion with two thesis: (1) as soon as we constitute ourselves as ideological 
subjects, as soon as we respond to the interpelation and assume a certain 
subject-position, we are a priori, per definitionem deluded, we are overlooking 
the radical dimension of the social antagonism, that is to say the traumatic 
kernel the symbolisation of which always fails; (2) it is precisely the Lacanian 
notion of the subject as »the answer of the real« which describes the subject 
in its confrontation with the antagonism, the subject which isn't avoiding the 
traumatic dimension of social antagonism. 
To explain these two points, let's take the case of class antagonism. The 
relationship between the classes is antagonistic in the L/M sense of the term, 
i. e, it is neither contradiction nor opposition but the »impossible« relationship 
between two terms: each of them is preventing the other f rom achieving its 
identity with itself, to become what it really is. As soon as I recognize myself, 
in an ideological interpelation, as a »proletarian«, I'm engaged in the social 
reality, fighting against the capitalist who is preventing me from realizing fully 
my human potential, blocking my full development. Where is here the ideo-
logical illusion proper to the subject-position? It lies precisely in the fact that 
it is the capitalist, this external enemy, who is preventing me from achieving 
an identity with myself: the illusion is that af ter the eventual annihilation of 
the antagonistic enemy, I will finally abolish the antagonism and arrive at an 
identity with myself. And it's the same with sexual antagonism: the feminist 
struggle against patriarchal, male chauvinist oppression is necessarily filled 
out by the illusion that afterwards, when patriarchal oppression is abolished, 
women will finally achieve their full identity with themselves, realize their 
human potentials, etc. Now, my thesis is that to grasp the notion of antagonism 
in its most radical dimension, we should invert the relation between the two 
terms: it is not the external enemy who is preventing me from achieving iden-
tity with myself, but every identity is already in itself blocked, marked by an 
impossibility, and the external enemy is simply the small piece, the rest of 
Slavoj Žižek: The Subject beiore Subjectivation 91 
reality upon which we »project« or »externalize« this intrinsic, immanent 
impossibility. That would be the last lesson of the famous Hegelian dialectics 
of the Master and the Servant, the lesson usually overlooked by Marxist read-
ing: the Master is in the last resort an invention of the Servant, it is a way 
for the Servant to »give way as to his desire«, te evade the blockade of his 
own desire by projecting its reason into the external repression of the Master. 
(Cf. Hegel 1952.) This is also the real ground for Freud's insistence that the 
Verdrängung cannot be reduced to an internalization of external repression 
(Unterdrückung): there is a certain fundamental, radical, constitutive, self-in-
flicted blockage, impediment, hindrance of the drive, and the stake of the fascia 
nanting figure of external Authority, of its repressive force, is precisely to 
make us blind to this self-impediment of the drive. That's why we could say 
that it's precisely in the moment when we achieve victory over the enemy in 
the antagonistic struggle in the social reality that we experience the antagonism 
in its most radical dimension, as a self-hindrance: far from enabling us finally 
to achieve full identity with ourselves, the moment of victory is the moment 
of greatest loss. The Servant frees himself from the Master only when he 
experiences how the Master was only embodying the auto-blockage of his own 
desire: what the Master through his external repression was supposed to de-
prive him of, to prevent him from realizing, he — the Servant — never pos-
sessed. This is the moment called by Hegel »the loss of a loss«: the experience 
that we never had what we were supposed to have lost. 
We can also determine this experience of a »loss of a loss« as the expe-
rience of the »negation of the negation«, i. e. of pure antagonism where the 
negation is brought to the point of self-reference. What is here at stake is no 
longer the fact that — as in an antagonistic fight with the external adversary — 
all the positivity, all the consistency of our position lies in the negation of 
the adversary's position and vice versa; what is at stake is the fact that the 
negativity of the other which is preventing me from achieving my full identity 
with myself is just an externalisation of my own auto-negativity, of my self-
hindering. The point is here how exactly to read, which accent to give to the 
crucial thesis of L/M that in the antagonism, the negativity as such assumes 
a positive existence. We can read this thesis as asserting that in an antagonistic 
relationship, the positivity of »our« position consists only in the positivation 
of our negative relation to the other, to the antagonist adversary: the whole 
consistency of our position is in the fact that we are negating the other, we 
are precisely this drive to abolish, to annihilate our adversary. In this case, 
the antagonistic relation is in a way symmetrical: each position is only its 
negative relation to the other (the Master prevents the Servant from achieving 
full identity with himself and vice versa). But if we radicalise the antagonistic 
fight in reality to the point of pure antagonism, the thesis that, in the anta-
gonism, the negativity as such assumes a positive existence, must be read in 
another way: the other itself (the Master, let's say) is, in his positivity, in his 
fascinating presence, just the positivation of our own — Servants — negative 
relationship towards ourselves, the positive embodiment of our own self-
blockage. The point is that here, the relationship is no longer symmetrical: 
we cannot say that the Servant is also in the same way just the positivation 
of the negative self-relationship of the Master. What we can perhaps say is that 
he is the Master's symptom. When we radicalize the antagonistic fight to a 
point of pure antagonism, it is always one of the two moments which, through 
92 Vestnik IMS, 1988/1 
the positivity of the other, maintains a negative self-relationship: to use a 
Hegelian term, this other element functions as a »reflexive determination« 
(Reflexionsbestimmung) of the first (cf. Hegel 1966) — the Master, for example, 
is just a reflexive determination of the Servant. Or, to take the sexual diffe-
rence/antagonism: Man is a reflexive determination of Woman's impossibility 
of achieving an identitiy with itself (which is why the Woman is a symptom of 
the Man). 
We must then distinguish the experience of antagonism in its radical form, 
as a limit of the social, as the impossibility around which the social field is 
structured, from antagonism as the relation between two antagonistic subject-
positions: in Lacanian terms, we must distinguish antagonism as real from 
the social reality of the antagonistic fight. And the Lacanian notion of the 
subject aims precisely at the experience of »pure« antagonism as self-hindering, 
self blockage, this internal limit preventing the symbolic field from realising 
its full identity : the stake of the entire process of subjectivation, of assuming 
different subject-positions is, in the last resort, precisely to enable us to avoid 
this traumatic experience. The limit of the social as it is defined by L/M, this 
paradoxical limit which causes that »the Society doesn't exist« — the L/M 
paraphrase of the Lacanian »Woman doesn't exist« — this limit isn't just 
something that subverts each subject-position, each defined identity of the 
subject; on the contrary, this limit is at the same time what sustains the sub-
ject in its most radical dimension: »the subject« in the Lacanian sense is the 
name for this internal limit, this internal inpossibility of the Other, of the 
»substance«. The subject is a paradoxical entity which persists only insofar 
as its full realisation is blocked, a paradoxical entity of which what at first 
sight appears as a limitation is a positive condition. In short: there is an object, 
a remnant which resists subjectivation, and the subject is precisely correlative 
to this object. 
* 
What is the status of this subject before subjectivation? Roughly speaking, 
the Lacanian answer would be that before subjectivation as identification, be-
fore ideological interpelation, before assuming a certain subject-position, the 
subject is a subject of a question. At first sight, it may seem that we are here 
again in the middle of traditional philosophical problematics: subject as a 
force of negativity which can question every given, objective status of things, 
introducing into the positivity the openness of the ques t ion ing . . . in a word, 
the subject is a question. But the Lacanian position is its exact opposite: the 
subject is not a question, it is an answer, the answer of the real to the question 
aksed by the great Other, the symbolic order. (Cf. Miller 1984—85.) It isn't 
the subject which is asking the question — the subject is the void of the impos-
sibility of answering the question of the Other. 
To explain this, let us refer to the interesting book by Aron Bodenheimer 
Why? On the obscenity of questioning (cf. Bodenheimer 1984). Its fundamental 
thesis is that there is something obscene in the act of asking a question as such, 
without regard to its content. It's the form of the question as such which is 
obscene: the question lays open, exposes, denudes its addressee, it invades his 
sphere of intimacy; which is why the basic, elementary reaction to a question 
is shame, on the bodily level, blushing and lowering our eyes — as a child 
whom we are asking »What were you doing?«. Already in our everyday expe-
Slavoj Žižek: The Subject beiore Subjectivation 93 
rience, it is clear that such a questioning of children is a priori culpabilizing, 
provoking in the other an effect of guilt: »What were you doing? Where were 
you? What does this white spot mean?« — even if I can offer an answer which 
is objectively true and at the same time delivering me of the guilt (»1 was 
learning with my friend«, for example), the guilt is already admitted on the 
level of desire, every answer is an excuse: with a quick answer »1 was learning 
with a friend« I'm precisely confirming that I didn't really want to do that, 
that my desire was to stroll about or something like t h a t . . . 
Questioning is the basic procedure of the totalitarian intersubjective re-
lationship: one needs not to refer to such exemplary cases as police interro-
gation or religious confession, it is quite sufficient to recall the usual abusing 
of the enemy in the real-socialist press: how more threating is the question 
»Who is really hiding behind . . . (the demands for the freedom of press, for 
democracy)? Who is really pulling the strings of the so-called new social 
movements? Who is really speaking through them?« than the vulgar, direct 
positive affirmation »Those who demand the freedom of the press really want 
to open the space for the activity of the counter-socialist powers and in this 
way diminish the hegemony of the working class . . .«. Totalitarian power is not 
a dogmatism which has all the answers, it is on the contrary the instance which 
has all the questions. 
The basic indecency of the question consists in its drive to put into words 
what should be left unspoken — as in a wellknown dialogue: »What were 
you doing? — You know what! — Yes, but I want you to tell me!« Which is 
then the instance in the other, in its addressee, that the question is aiming at? 
It aims at a point at which the answer isn't possible, where the word is lacking, 
where the subject is exposed in his impotence. We can illustrate this by the 
inverse type of the question, not by the question of the authority to its subjects 
but by the question of the subject-child to his father: the stake of such a que-
stion is always to catch the other who embodies the authority in his impotence, 
in his inability, in his lack. Bodenheimer articulates this dimension à propos 
the child's question to the fa ther : »Father, why is the sky blue?« — the child 
isn't really interested in the sky as such, the real stake of the question is to 
expose father 's impotence, his helplessness in front of the factum brutum that 
the sky is blue, his incapacity to substantiate this fact, to present the whole 
chain of reasons leading to it. The blue of the sky becomes thus not only 
father 's problem, but in a way even his fault: »The sky is blue, and you're just 
staring at it like an idiot, incapable of doing anything about it!« A question, 
even if it refers only to a given state of things, makes the subject always for-
mally responsible for it, although only in a negative way, i. e. responsible for 
his impotence regarding this fact. This dimension becomes manifest in the 
negative form of a question, when we add to a question the so-called ne explé-
tif. If I say »Is it warm?«, we might still be temped to conceive the question 
as simply aiming at an objective state of things; but if I say »Isn't it warm?«, 
the addressee himself is aimed at as responsible for this state of things: »Why 
is it warm? Why didn't you do anything about it?« — another confirmation of 
the Lacanian thesis that the ne explétif is a point of the inscription of the 
subject in a signifying chain. 
What is then this point in the other where the word fails, this point of 
impotence at which the question as such is aiming? The question as such 
creates shame because it aims at my innermost, intimate kernel called by 
94 Vestnik IMS, 1988/1 
Freud Kern unseres Wesens and by Lacan das Ding, at that strange body in 
my interior which is »in me more than me«, which is radically interior and 
the same time already exterior and for which Lacan coined a new word 
extime. The real object of the question is what Plato in Symposion called — 
through the mouth of Alcibiades — agalma, the hidden treasure, the object 
in me which precisely cannot be objectivated, dominated. The Lacanian form 
of this object is of course I'objet petit a, this point of real in the very heart 
of subject which cannot be symbolised, which is produced as a rest, a remnant, 
a left-over of every signifying operation, a hard core embodying horrifying 
jouissance, enjoyment and as such an object which at the same time attracts 
and repels us, i. e. which divides our desire and thus provokes shame. 
Our thesis is that it is precisely the question in its obscene dimension, in-
sofar as it aims at the ex-timate kernel, at what is in subject more than subject, 
at the object in subject, which is constitutive for the subject. In other words, 
there is no subject without guilt, the subject exists only insofar as it is ashamed 
because of the object in himself, in its interior. This is the meaning of Lacan's 
thesis that the subject is originally split, divided: it is divided as to the object 
in himself, as to the Thing, which at the same time attracts and repels 
him: $ 0 a. 
Let us resume: the subject is an answer of the real (of the object, of the 
traumatic kernel) to the question of the Other. The question as such produces 
in its addressee an effect of shame and guilt, it divides, it hysterizes him, 
and this hysterization is the constitution of the subject: the status of the subject 
as such is hysterical. The subject is constituted through its own division, split-
ting, as to the object in him; this object, this traumatic kernel is precisely the 
dimension that we've already indicated as that of a »death drive«, of a t rau-
matic imbalance, rooting out. Man as such is »nature sick to death«, derailed, 
run off the rails through a fascination with a lethal Thing. And the proces 
of interpelation-subjectivation is precisely an essay to elude, to avoid this 
traumatic kernel through the identification: in assuming a symbolic mandate, 
in recognizing himself in the interpelation, the subject evades the dimension 
of the Thing. (There are, of course, other possibilities of avoiding this hysterical 
deadlock: the perverse position, for example, in which the subject identifies 
himself immediately with the object and thus relieves himself of the burden 
of the question. Psychoanalysis itself also de-hysterizes the subject, but in 
another way: at the end of the psychoanalysis, the question is so to speak 
returned to the Other, the impotence of the subject displaces itself into the 
impossibility proper to the Other itself: the subject experiences the Other itself 
as blocked, failed, marked with a central impossibility, in brief, as »antago-
nistic«.) 
* 
The subject, then, as an impossible answer, consubstantive with a certain 
guilt — the first literary association which comes to our mind is of course 
the work of Franz Kafka. And indeed, we might say that the achievement of 
Kafka is to articulate this paradoxical status of the subject before subjectiva-
tion — we were speaking of shame and the last words of The Trial are preci-
sely ».. . it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.« (Kafka 1985, 251.) 
Where lies the subversive force of Kafka? We might approach it from 
the Althusserian problematic of the ideological state-apparatuses and ideological 
Slavoj Žižek: The Subject beiore Subjectivation 95 
interpelation (cf. Althusser 1976); the weak point of Althusser is that he or his 
school never succeeded in thinking out the link between these two mechanisms: 
how does the ideological state-apparatus (i. e. the »machine« in the Pascalian 
meaning, the signifying automatism) »internalize« itself, how does it produce 
the effect of ideological belief in a Cause and the interconnected effect of 
subjectivation, of recognition of one's ideological position? Kafka develops a 
kind of criticism of Althusser avant la lettre, in letting us see the gap between 
the two: Kafka's famous »irrational« bureaucracy, this blind gigantic, non-
sensical apparatus, isn't it precisely the ideological state-apparatus with which 
a subject is confronted before any identification, any recognition takes place? 
What can we then learn f rom Kafka? 
In a first approach, the starting point in Kafka's novels is precisely that 
of an interpelation: Kafkian subject is interpelated by a mysterious bureau-
cratic entity (Law, Castle). But this interpelation has a somewhat strange look: 
it is so to say an interpelation without identification, it is not offering us a 
Cause to identity with — the Kafkian subject is the subject desperately seeking 
a trait with which to identify, he doesn't understand the meaning of the call 
of the Other. 
This situation is in itself culpabilizing. Which is why we find in Kafka's 
work the reverse, disquieting side of the comical aspect of interpelation: the 
illusion proper to interpelation, the illusion of »already-there«, shows its ne-
gative face. The procedure of culpabilization is precisely to put the subject into 
the position of somebody who is already supposed to know (to use this Lacanian 
term in another context). For example, in The Trial, Josef K. is summoned 
to appear before the Court on Sunday morning; the exact time of interrogation 
is not specified. When he finally finds the court-room, the judge reproaches 
him: »You should have been here an hour and five minutes ago.« (Ibid., 47.) 
Some of us probably remember the same situation from army service: the 
corporal culpabilizes us from the very beginning with a cry: »What are you 
staring at like idiots? Dont't you know what to do? One really has to explain 
again and again things to you!« — and then he proceeds to give us instructions 
as if they were superfluous, as if we should already know them. This is then 
the reverse side of the ideological »already-there« illusion: the subject is cul-
pabilized by suddenly being thrown into a situation in which he is supposed 
to know what is expected of him. 
* 
We have described four different ethical positions and the four corre-
spondent notions of the subject; at least concerning the first three of them, 
it is not difficult to find a global political standpoint which they imply: if 
Habermas' ethics of the communicative action remains attached to the social-
democratic mainstream, to a faith in the progressive realisation of the political 
potentials of Modernity; if Althusser, trying to save the Marxist orthodoxy 
of the Class Struggle, Party and the Proletarian Dictatorship as a nostalgic 
lost Object of desire, has served as a theoretical framework for some of the 
Third World radical revolutionaries (from Latin America to Maoism and Pol 
Pot whose supporter is still the ex-althusserian Alain Badiou); if Foucault acti-
vely participated in the political struggles of the so-called marginalist move-
ments (sexual and racial minorities, prisoners, the mentally insane. ..), the 
political potential of the Lacanian theory has yet to be fully articulated. Is this 
96 Vestnik IMS, 1988/1 
a contingent fact or an effect of a structural impossibility? What is clear is 
that the first three versions (the progressism of the social-democratic main-
stream, the Third-World radical orthodoxy, the marginalist movements) are 
more and more attesting their unfitness to serve as a model for the Left today. 
Will the Lacanian theory succeed in offering a theoretical f ramework enabling 
us to articulate the new demands of the Left, escaping the first three above-
mentioned versions: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy perhaps indicates that 
a positive answer to this question cannot be totally excluded, however impro-
bable it may appear in view of the fate of the Lacanian theory to date. 
What does this mean, »politically«? Let us just remember the deadlock 
of the old Maoist class-struggle radicalism: »class struggle is eternal« etc. — 
but where does the class enemy draw the force for his eternal regeneration? 
From the negative self-relationship of the »proletarian« side itself. As soon as 
we admit that, we reach the level of what Hegel calls »reconciliation« or 
»absolute spirit« (cf. Hegel 1959); we can still fight our political battles, but 
we became aware of the fact that they include a necessary delusion, we became 
aware of the limit of political as such. To conclude with a Lacanian paradox: 
there is nothing that couldn't be »politicised«, that couldn't become an object 
of political struggle, but still the field of political is not »all«, there is a certain 
limit to it, although there is nothing beyond this limit. 
This limitation of the field of politics doesn't entail any kind of resigna-
tion — or, if there is a resignation, it is a paradox of the enthusiastic resigna-
tion: I'm using here the term »enthusiasm« in its strict Kantian meaning, as 
indicating an experience of the (noumenal) object through the failure itself 
of its adequate representation. Enthusiasm and resignation are not then two 
opposed moments: it is the »resignation« itself, i. e. the experience of a certain 
impossibility, which incites enthusiasm. 
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