ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the conceptualisation of $, which in Lacan’s algebra stands for the ‘barred’ or the ‘destructed’ subject, the subject that is nothing but full of emptiness. The Lacanian subject has no identity itself; instead it is defined by a lack that is filled by the Other. For Benjamin the flâneur, the dandy who strolled through nineteenth-century Parisian arcades, is such a ‘destructed subject’. The flâneurs subjectivity is characterised by a special empathy with the commodity that lures him into a’dream world’ in which the most mundane things for sale can be enjoyed. In what is a series of interruptions, the image of the flâneur, who for Benjamin is the archetypical subject of nineteenth-century modernity, is ‘translated’ into today’s world of twenty-firstcentury ‘hypermodern(organ)isation’, whose main icon, it could be argued, is the management consultant. This interruptive ‘translation’ is done by way of discussing the ‘goings-on’ of commodity fetishism which is shown to be the main ‘phantasmagoric’ fantasy, or ideology, of modernity. It is argued that the commodity enables the subject to identify with what is otherwise a failing Other-the commodity-Other fills the subject. This chapter’s critique of commodity fetishism is, however, not thought to be a call for a transparency of social relations. Quite the contrary, what is shown with Zižek is that precisely this belief in transparency is already part of the ‘goings-on’ of commodity fetishism. In the last part of this chapter, the question of hope is raised. It is argued that there is no hope for transparency, progress or a full identity of the subject; instead there is only hope for a failure of the relationship between subject and Other. It is precisely this failure which describes the political importance of the question of the subject and the Other.
