Editing Slavoj Žižek (section)

===Subjectivity===
For Žižek, although a [[Subject (philosophy)|subject]] may take on a symbolic (social) position, it can never be reduced to this attempted symbolisation, since the very "taking on" of this position implies a separate 'I', beyond the symbolic, that does the taking on. Yet, under scrutiny, nothing positive can be said about this subject, this 'I', that eludes symbolisation; it cannot be discerned as anything but "that which cannot be symbolised". Thus, without the initial, attempted, failed symbolisation, subjectivity cannot present itself. As Žižek writes in his first book in English: "the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of its own representation; that is why the failure of representation is the only way to represent it adequately."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Žižek |first1=Slavoj |title=The Sublime Object of Ideology |date=1989 |publisher=Verso |location=London & New York |isbn=0860919714 |page=175}}</ref>

Žižek attributes this position on the subject to [[Hegel]], particularly his description of man as "the night of the world",<ref>{{cite book |last1=Žižek |first1=Slavoj |title=The Parallax View |date=2006 |publisher=MIT Press |location=Cambridge, MA |isbn=9780262240512 |page=22}}</ref> and to [[Lacan]], with his description of the barred, split subject, who he sees as developing the [[Cartesianism|Cartesian]] notion of the [[Cogito, ergo sum|cogito]].<ref>{{cite book |last1=Žižek |first1=Slavoj |title=The Sublime Object of Ideology |date=1989 |publisher=Verso |location=London & New York |isbn=0860919714 |page=72}}</ref> According to Žižek, these thinkers, in insisting on the role of the subject, run counter to "[[Culturalism|culturalist]]" or "[[Historicism|historicist]]" positions held by thinkers such as [[Louis Althusser]] and [[Michel Foucault]], which posit that "subjects" are bound by and reducible to their historical/cultural(/symbolic) context.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Žižek |first1=Slavoj and Sbriglia, Russell |title=Subject Matters |date=2020 |publisher=Northwestern University Press |location=Evanston |pages=3–21}}</ref>