Back to index

9:47

(In »The syntheist agent and her desires and drives«)

Descartes is thus correct in one sense, at least to some degree, but not in the way he himself thinks: there is really a subject, but it is a fundamentally illusory such. The subject experience is impossible to deny or even regulate or avoid once one is clear about its illusory nature. It exists only in our own heads, yet exists to the highest degree. The subject is a constantly recurring element of disturbance in the flow of being which precisely therefore succeeds in tying together being into a being that appears as something that can be taken in and is at least manageable in patches. Since first and foremost this subject is the necessary first eternalisation of the mobilist chaos of existence, we call it the eternalist subject. But the subject should in no way be regarded as a ‘managing director’ of consciousness. As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan points out, the subject is instead harboured in the subconscious. However, it is not synonymous with the subconscious. Rather, the subject is synonymous with the struggle between consciousness and the subconscious, in precisely the subconscious, and survives since this antagonism never reaches or can achieve any permanent solution. The fact that we cannot imagine the subject as a completed project, that we cannot see ourselves as complete human beings, is the very prerequisite for the subjective experience. The change in our essence and inadequacy drives us towards the change.