Back to index

9:7

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

However, this basic illusoriness should be understood as something extremely productive: a limitation of external stimuli is a fundamental prerequisite for the flowering of inner creativity. The less information that is added to the syntheist agent’s mind, the more richly she can fantasise about and expand her subjective experience. The Hegelian philosopher Slavoj Zizek develops the idea of illusoriness as basic to the subjective experience. He argues that, seen at its most profound, the subject must be regarded as the excluded in the subjective experience, as the subjective experience’s excrement, the piece of the puzzle that does not fit in, that which constantly fails and never succeeds in hitting home, that within the subject that the subject itself tries to push away and hide from itself and from the surrounding world. We call this the abjective subject. Or as Zizek himself expresses the matter: “I am my own lack, I am my own excrement.” This restricted subject is maintained through a pronounced internal distance. And the distance is existentially necessary; if it is nullified, the subject collapses.