ABSTRACT
In an essay published in 1998 entitled ‘Cartesian Subject versus Cartesian Theater,’ Slavoj Zˇizˇek sets himself the task of locating, against the grain of Hegelian thought, the beginnings of a history of the decentered subject.1 Far from the recent phenomenon it purports to be, Zˇizˇek says, the struggle with the decentered subject is already emerging in the work of such German Idealist writers as Holderlin, Novalis, and Schelling. Rather than wrestle with prototypical precursors of decenteredness or their rationalist antagonists, however, Zˇizˇek chooses to interpellate more recent theorists of the decentered self: consciousness theorists like Daniel Dennett.2 But while Zˇizˇek’s argument has points of similarity to my own — that studies such as Dennett’s develop a theory of consciousness that denies its unconscious element, and that this denial amounts to a kind of repression that, ironically, constructs a theory of the unconscious within the very work itself — he does not, as do I, locate this torsion primarily within the conceptual frame of the theatrical, a frame that I believe essential to the understanding of identity’s stagings.
