Art of Living

The "art of living," as theorized in Ruti's The Call of Character, designates an ethical-practical orientation through which the subject actively engages with and refashions its unconscious fixations rather than passively enduring them. It is not a merely aesthetic self-styling in the Foucauldian sense, but an ethical project: the subject is called to metabolize past trauma, work through repetition compulsion, and orient desire toward the Thing — the impossible, constitutive lack at the heart of subjectivity — while nevertheless owning the fate this desire traces. The art of living is, crucially, distinguished from any purely conscious self-management: a self-fashioning that incorporates only conscious material merely grazes the periphery of psychic life, leaving the subject with impoverished self-knowledge and diminished capacity to steer itself toward what genuinely animates it.

The second occurrence deepens this concept dialectically: the art of living requires an oscillation between self-surrender — access to the pre-socialized, asocial strata of being, the dimensions of the self most resistant to normalization — and disciplined structure. This is not a simple balance but a productive tension that keeps character singular and revitalizable. Without self-surrender, discipline becomes mechanical repetition; without discipline, self-surrender dissolves into formlessness. Together, they constitute the dynamic form by which singular character resists social homogenization and the flattening of desire.

This concept belongs exclusively to the source mari-ruti-the-call-of-character-living-a-life-worth-living-columbia-university-p, where it functions as a synthesizing, programmatic term for the book's overarching ethical argument. It sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. The art of living presupposes the structure of Das Ding: desire must remain oriented toward the impossible Thing rather than settling for manageable, socially sanctioned goods — to do otherwise would reduce the art of living to a mere "service of goods." It is closely bound to sublimation in its operative logic: like sublimation, the art of living does not aim to eliminate the constitutive lack but to work creatively with it, raising the subject's actual life toward the dignity of what matters most (the Thing) without pretending to fill the void. The role of singularity is equally central — the art of living is precisely that practice by which the subject cultivates and maintains the irreplaceable thisness of its character against social homogenization. Character (another cross-referenced concept) is the medium through which the art of living is enacted: it is the sedimented form of the subject's idiosyncratic desire-history that the art of living both inherits and actively reshapes.

The concept also engages implicitly with anxiety and lack: the oscillation between self-surrender and discipline implies a willingness to endure the anxiety produced by proximity to the Real dimensions of one's being, and this tolerance is precisely what separates the art of living from defensive strategies that merely manage or suppress psychic life. Compared to sublimation as a canonical concept, the art of living is a more explicitly ethical and practical specification — it is not just the structural operation of raising an object to the dignity of the Thing, but the ongoing, sustained practice of living in fidelity to one's desire while metabolizing the repetitions that would otherwise foreclose it.

The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth LivingMari Ruti · 2014 (p.174)

The art of living I have been promoting can be said to require a similar combination of self-surrender and discipline.

The phrase "self-surrender and discipline" is theoretically loaded because it frames the art of living as an inherently dialectical structure: "self-surrender" names the necessary exposure to the pre-symbolic, asocial Real of the subject's singular being (aligned with the logic of das Ding and the drive), while "discipline" names the symbolic-structural work required to give that exposure form and direction. The word "combination" refuses any simple synthesis, preserving the tension as constitutive rather than collapsing it into a stable unity.