The death of the Big Other as the end of Being Some-Thing

File: Chp-XV045.jpg (665KB, 1546x2222px) Image search: [Google]

665KB, 1546x2222px

The death of God, as Zizek describes Lacan’s Big Other, means precisely that we are on our own. This transposition of the ‘center’ means precisely that at the center is either our being or a void. Life or Death. The Big Other, after the Death of God has also been transplanted with notions such Country, Family, or our Self. Of all these it is the last one, the Self, which holds over me the greatest of deadlocks. The notion of being ‘the best person I can be’ is always a idealization, an arms length appropriation to the ongoing process known as Life, Reality, Being-in-the-world. The idealization works as a replacement for the Big Other, my own Self idea a center to which I can lean on, look to for guidance, expect to live for me or at least live in my stead. The living at arms length is directly in contrast to an authentic being-in-the-world, responding to the ongoing process with all my available resources. The Big Other as Self is now the environmental support I go to. Self-support is environmental support then. The radical notion that is being suggested is close to crazy but necessary nonetheless; the self itself is an idea and the most mature way to appropriate to the world is without any support at all. This face-to-face with reality is precisely the violent confrontation that support systems have been defending us from but from which there can never be a truly unbreakable to defense. The truest truth is not only that we are alone, but that if we do not appropriate to the ongoing process authentically, if we cannot make proper contact with the way in which we are in the world as a being, then we are defenseless. The death of the Self as the last Big Other is the beginning of a Way in the world that is yet to be.