Charles Taylor’s ‘Sexuated’ Subjects
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Conclusion
Taylor is certainly to be commended in seeking to define the subject as an ethical subject. This endeavor is placed within his larger project of re-activating an ethics of a past time. Because of his alignment with this tradition, however, he is disturbed by a certain excess that inevitably appears whenever and however speaking subjects conduct themselves. Recalling the long quote above, we read Taylor as possessing a strong desire to keep our conduct as free as possible from all excess. But by endeavoring to do so, by today’s standards, ethical actions would lose all meaning, since it is precisely that excess which constitutes the only legitimate territory on which to found a ‘new’ ethics. Quite simply, from today’s perspective, ethical gestures can only appear to us as excessive. The paradox is that Taylor ends up rejecting the only possible terrain to ground a re-formulation of ethicality by precisely attempting to revive (traditional) ethics. By contrast, Kant was the first to formulate an ethics based on such an excess, while Lacan further radicalized Kant, with another radical twist. (Zupančič 2000: 3)
But as we have seen, there is no theoretical reason preventing Taylor from reaching similar conclusions as Kant and Lacan, as his two notions of the strong evaluator and the simple weigher provide the logical framework with which to forge a more proper ethical notion of the self. What needs to be done, as we attempted above, is to examine the topological figures that each of these two represent, and then to think them together in a speculative identity. As a first approximation, we can see that the split between the strong evaluator and simple weigher is again repeated within the figure of the former. But what we further see is that the simple weigher represents an articulating movement of signifiers which must be experienced as simultaneously consubstantial with the void of subjectivity, as well as simultaneously providing a ‘content’ to fill in that void with a phantasmatic ‘deep self’ image17, which is in turn embodied within Taylor’s notion of the modern, strong evaluator self. This latter self is split not simply between its ‘shallow’ self and its ‘deep’ self, but rather at the level of its Notion, whereby evaluations of the self’s depth are always only partial articulations of a purely presupposed full sense of self that would be noumenally grasped if only one could manage a final God’s eye point of view. So, in some sense, the strong evaluator is the ‘epistemological’ part of the self, while the simple weigher provides its essential ‘ontological’ component. And the crucial step to take would be to conceive of these two together: the epistemological failure of deep articulations is ontologically constitutive of selfhood. Another way to express this would be to conceive of the combined structure of these two notions of (ethical) selfs as tautological, as the ‘repetition of the same that fills up and simultaneously announces an abyss that gives rise to unbearable anxiety.’18
This anxiety-provoking abyss is of course the subject qua void that inherently ruptures things from within and is the very same excess that disturbs Taylor’s ethical field from without. He cannot but see it as a foreign disruption, ultimately to be dismissed or explained away as ‘impossible.’ Playing off Taylor’s name, we could perhaps say that his project is, in large part, an endeavor to ‘sew up’ the tear which such an ethical subject affects in the establishment of its ethical horizon, to provide a seamless philosophical accounting that would ‘stitch over’ that primordial gesture of traumatic beginnings. This is certainly the significance behind his self-characterization of his overall project as ‘attempts to define the modern identity in describing its genesis.’ (Taylor 1989: x) If the subject does emerge as a pure difference in relation to its own Being, there then follows an effort to appropriate the latter by way of a narrative radical re-evaluation, having the end goal of providing meaning to life through deep articulation. As Taylor writes, ‘because we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and thus determine our place relative to it and hence determine the direction of our lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form, as a “quest.” ’ (Taylor 1989: 51–2) In contrast, we have attempted to expose the underlying logic of Taylor’s strategy to conceptualize the inextricable link between subjectivity and ethicality, discovering a disavowed element that, once uncovered, seriously jeopardizes Taylor’s conclusions. While doing so, we have tentatively pointed toward an alternative framework that both refuses a return to a traditional discourse of trans-historical valuations, as well as resists a post-modern reduction of the ethical horizon to one’s own life. Rather, such a disavowed element should form the very starting point for an alternative conception of the human subject and its relation to the Good.
We began this paper by noting that Taylor celebrates the pre-Platonic ethic of being ready to sacrifice life itself for some greater Cause. We have seen that for Taylor, the modern subject must be resuscitated back toward such an ethic. But what he overlooks is that this very resuscitating effort is its very own such Cause, thereby forming the phantasmatic support and providing the raison d’être not only for his philosophy as a whole, but also for the theoretical subject articulated within and by his philosophy – the very subject said to engage in deep self evaluations of such Causes. Taylor’s project leaves us with the truly radical step yet to be taken: today we need to accomplish the self-relating gesture that would sacrifice the very Cause itself for which the subject was ready to sacrifice everything for, including his life. This ‘impossible’ gesture reveals that the subject only emerges via this double, self-relating sacrifice and it is only at this point that we can truly consider the subject radically responsible for its self and the Good with which it is inextricably linked.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
