[Dues]

Every life is inexplicable… No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling… We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person inside the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end, we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

What can this tell us about the extimate core of the subject, the lack and desire of the Other? That there is something at the 'center' of the subject which has been forgone. Or to put it another way, it is precisely the center of the subject that has been forgone (and thus the subject's decentering). Though again, this should not be viewed as a hollowing, as a threat to the subject, but rather as constitutive of the subject. According to Lacan, there is a necessary 'choice' involved in this 'process'. It is the choice the subject makes in favor of the Other's desire, and thereby in favor of its own subjectivity. This choice for the Other's desire at the expense of one's self, as we have already discussed, is a choice which includes a certain sacrifice, but a necessary sacrifice in order for the subject to emerge.

In "xxx xxxxxx xxxx", when considering what managing Xxxxxxxx’s writing means to him, the narrator thinks to himself, “I had stumbled onto a cause, a thing that justified me and made me feel important, and the more fully I disappeared into my ambitions for Xxxxxxxx, the more sharply I came into focus for myself.” This can be illustrative of how ‘choosing’ the Other is in fact a choice of freedom, not only in that one is ‘free’ to choose, but also in that gaining subjectivity allows you to be ‘free’ to perform (within) the will of the Other as if it were one's own: "Given the strain of reconciling myself to the project, it was probably necessary for me to equate Xxxxxxxx's success with my own". Also in this respect: “The true test, after all, is to be like everyone else. Once that happens, he no longer has to question his singularity. He is free – not only of others, but of himself” (italics, mine).