(phenomenology), nor is it a practical experimentation (moralism) nor is it an instance of materialist critique (imaginary, ideology). We are therefore compelled to say that the theory of the subject is axiomatic. It cannot be deduced, because it is the affirmation of its own form. But neither can it be experimented. Its thought is decided on the horizon of an irrefutable empirical dimension which we illustrated in the preface: there are truths, and there must be an active and identifiable form of their production (but also of what hinders or annuls this production). The name of this form is subject. Saying ‘subject’ or saying ‘subject with regard to truth’ is redundant. For there is a subject only as the subject of a truth, at the service of this truth, of its denial or of its occultation. Therefore ‘subject’ is a category of the materialist dialectic. Democratic materialism only knows individuals and communities, that is to say passive bodies, but it knows no subjects.
That is the directly ideological meaning of the post-Heideggerian decon-struction, under the epithet ‘metaphysical’, of the category of subject: to prepare a democracy without a (political) subject, to deliver individuals over to the serial organization of identities or to the confrontation with the desolation of their enjoyment. In the France of the sixties only Sartre (in a reactive mode) and Lacan (in an inventive mode) refused to play a part in
this drama. Consequently, both found themselves faced with the dialectic between subject (as structure) and subjectivation (as act). What does the subject subjectivate? As we’ve said, the subject comes to the place of the ‘except that’. But this syntactical determination does not elucidate the subject’s formal relation to the body that supports it.
Let’s consider things more analytically.
We have the trace of the event, and we have a body. Is the subject the
‘subjectivation’ of a link between the physics of the body and the name (or trace) of the event? For example, let’s suppose that following the revolt of a handful of gladiators around Spartacus, in 73 BC, the slaves—or rather some slaves, albeit in great numbers—form a body, instead of being dispersed into packs. Let’s agree that the trace of the revolt-event is the statement
‘We slaves, we want to return home’. Is the subject-form the operation whereby the new ‘body’ of the slaves (their army and its offshoots) con-nects to its trace?
In a sense, yes. It is indeed this conjunction that governs the strategies of Spartacus—strategies that happen to be fatal. First, to seek a passage towards the north, a border of the Roman Republic; then, to go south in order to commandeer some ships and leave Italy. These strategies are the subjective form borne by the body which is determined by the statement
‘We slaves, we want to return home’. But in another sense, the answer is no. That is because the subjective identity which is fashioned in and by these military movements is not identical with them; it passes through operations of a different kind, which constitute subjective deliberation, division and production. First of all, the slaves ‘as a body’ (as an army) move in a new present; for they are no longer slaves. Thus they show (to the other slaves) that it is possible, for a slave, no longer to be a slave, and to do so in the present. Hence the growth, which soon becomes menacing, of this body. This institution of the possible as present is typically a subjective production. Its materiality is constituted by the consequences drawn day after day from the event’s course, that is from a principle indexed to the possible: ‘We slaves, we want to and can return home’.
These consequences affect and reorganize the body by treating successive points within the situation. By ‘point’, we understand here simply what confronts the global situation with singular choices, with decisions that involve the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’. Is it really necessary to march south, or to attack Rome? To confront the legions, or evade them? To invent a new discipline, or to imitate regular armies? These oppositions, and how they are treated, gauge the efficacy of the slaves gathered together into a
fighting body; ultimately, they unfold the subjective formalism that this body is capable of bearing. In this sense, a subject exists, as the localization of a truth, to the extent it affirms that it holds a certain number of points. That is why the treatment of points is the becoming-true of the subject, at the same time as it serves to filter the aptitudes of bodies.
We will call present, and write π, the set of consequences of the evental trace, as realized by the successive treatment of points.
Besides the conjunction of the body and the trace, the subject is a rela-tion to the present, which is effective to the extent that the body possesses the subjective aptitudes for this relation, that is, once it disposes of or is able to impose some organs of the present. Take, for instance, the specialized military detachments that the slaves, led by Spartacus, try to constitute in their midst in order to face the Roman cavalry. This is why we say that the elements of the body are incorporated into the evental present. This is obvious if one considers, for example, a slave who escapes in order to enlist in Spartacus’s troops. What he thereby joins is, empirically speaking, an army. But in subjective terms, it is the realization in the present of a hitherto unknown possibility. In this sense it is indeed into the present, into the new present, that the escaped slave incorporates himself. It is clear that the body here is subjectivated to the extent that it subordinates itself to the novelty of the possible (the content of the statement ‘We slaves, we want to and can return home’). This amounts to a subordination of the body to the trace, but solely in view of an incorporation into the present, which can also be understood as a production of consequences: the greater the number of escaped slaves, the more the Spartacus-subject amplifies and changes in kind, and the more its capacity to treat multiple points increases.
We now need symbols to denote the body, the trace, consequence (qua operation) and the present (qua result). We must also denote sub-ordination, or the oriented conjunction, which is ultimately essential. We have already written the trace as ε, the body as C and the present as π.
We will symbolize the consequence by ‘⇒’ and subordination by ‘—’ (the bar). But we’re not done. Since the body is only subjectivated to the extent that, decision by decision, it treats some points, we must indicate that a body is never entirely in the present. It is divided into, on the one hand, an efficacious region, an organ appropriate to the point being treated, and, on the other, a vast component which, with regard to this point, is inert or even negative. If, for example, the slaves confront the Roman cavalry, the small disciplined detachment readied for this task is incorporated into the
present, but the general disorder of the remainder, with its multiplicity of languages (Gauls, Greeks, Jews. . .), the presence of women, its rivalry between improvised leaders, drags the whole towards the termination or impracticability of the new possible. Nevertheless, in different circum-stances—for instance, the organization in the encampment of a new form of civic life—this order-less multiplicity, this unheard of and improvised cosmopolitanism, will be an inestimable resource, offset by the arrogance of well-trained detachments of gladiators. In other words, notwithstanding its subjection to the generality of the principle derived from the trace, the body is always divided by the points it treats. We will mark this important feature, on which Lacan rightly insisted, with erasure, the diagonal bar or slash, ‘/’, which is the writing of the cleavage: under its subjectivated form, the body is therefore inscribed as ‘¢’.
We can now formalize what we said about the enlisted slave. Qua pure subjective form, we have a body under erasure (the army in the process of formation, but which remains without unity) subordinated to the trace (‘We slaves . . .’), but only in view of an incorporation into the present, which is always a consequence (this risky battle against the new legions which one must decide upon or refuse to wage). And these consequences, which treat some major points in the Roman historical world, found a new truth in the present: that the fate of the wretched of the earth is never a law of nature, and that it can, if only for the duration of a few battles, be revoked.
The foregoing can be summarized in the matheme of the faithful subject ε
¢⇒ π
It is important to understand that the faithful subject as such is not con-tained in any of the letters of its matheme, but that it is the formula as a whole. It is a formula in which a divided (and new) body becomes, under the bar, something like the active unconscious of a trace of the event—an activity which, by exploring the consequences of what has happened, engenders the expansion of the present and exposes, fragment by frag-ment, a truth. Such a subject realizes itself in the production of con-sequences, which is why it can be called faithful—faithful to ε and thus to that vanished event of which ε is the trace. The product of this fidelity is the new present which welcomes, point by point, the new truth. We could also say that it is the subject in the present.
This subject is faithful to the trace, and thus to the event, since the division of its body falls under the bar, so that the present may finally come to be in which it will rise up in its own light.