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In his recent monumental book on Hegel, Zizek makes the point that the “Lacanian” split subject is driven, not just by the famous triad of how it imagines itself over and against the big Other of the social symbolic order and its Real material/animal existence, but also by its non-appearance of the self to itself. Here, as is typical, Zizek uses a joke: two men are at a theatre, knocking back a few drinks while in the audience. At some point, one of the men gets up to use the toilet, embarrassingly lurching around for the WC. Finally, desperate to relieve himself, he pops through a door and spots a potted plant. Frantic, he relieves himself right there. After some copious urination, he zips up and eventually finds his way back to his seat. “What a pity;’ his friend tells him as he sits down. “You missed the best part! Some man just came on stage and pissed in the potted plant!” Zizek provides the moral from here: “The subject necessarily misses its own act, it is never there to see its own appearance on the stage, its own intervention is the blind spot of its gaze:’ In the movie theatre, is this not the split between what Zizek calls the void of the subject, the pure cogito that has exited the room, and the subject as he appears to the Other in the social symbolic pissing on the plant?

SPECULATIVE REALISM
PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS
Peter Gratton