Being of an Outcast

The "being of an outcast" is Zupančič's term for the mode of existence that Oedipus at Colonus embodies once the signifying order has expelled him — not a heroic assumption of symbolic castration, but a literal casting-off from the chain of signifiers altogether. Where the standard Hegelian-inflected reading prizes Oedipus as the tragic subject who internalizes guilt and thereby achieves ethical subjectivation, Zupančič insists that the blinded, wandering Oedipus occupies a more radical position: he is not constituted by the lack-of-being that the signifier installs in every speaking subject, but rather exists as the remainder the signifier ejects — its "spittle." This is an existence on the underside of symbolic inscription, structurally akin to what Lacan calls the abject real that escapes representation entirely.

This concept therefore names a mode of being irreducible to the ordinary dialectic of lack. Whereas the subject of desire is defined by a constitutive lack that keeps desire in motion — always at a calculated distance from das Ding — the being of an outcast designates a position beyond even that economy: neither the subject who lacks, nor the object of desire, but the discarded residue of the signifying operation itself. Zupančič positions this not as a failure of subjectivation but as an ethical achievement — one closer to traversing the fantasy and identifying with the symptom than to any normative resolution through guilt, mourning, or symbolic reconciliation.

Within alenka-zupancic-ethics-of-the-real-kant-and-lacan-2000, the "being of an outcast" appears in the book's final reckoning with tragic ethics, where Zupančič pushes back against any reading that domesticates the Oedipus figure by folding him back into the economy of symbolic guilt. The concept functions as an extension and radicalization of the Ethics of Psychoanalysis as Lacan formulates it in Seminar VII: if Lacanian ethics enjoins fidelity to desire against the "service of goods," Zupančič presses further to ask what happens at the limit case where the subject is not even held within the symbolic economy of desire and lack. The being of an outcast is what lies on the far side of that economy — not das Ding (the forbidden interior void around which desire orbits) but something structurally expelled from the symbolic altogether, closer to the logic of objet petit a as leftover or remainder.

The concept cross-references Fantasy and Jouissance in a precise way: the outcast's existence is not structured by fantasy ($◇a), because fantasy presupposes a barred subject still tethered to the signifying chain; instead the outcast is the excess that fantasy normally screens off. Similarly, where Jouissance is constituted through the Law's prohibition and is thus still caught in the dialectic of the signifier, the being of an outcast suggests a jouissance-like residue that is not prohibited but simply discarded — "cast off" rather than forbidden. The Name of the Father and Lack are implicated as the structural coordinates the outcast has been expelled from: it is precisely because the paternal signifier has not resolved but rather voided his position that Oedipus is reduced to this remainder-existence. Zupančič thereby offers a specification — and in some respects a critique — of any ethical model that glorifies lack-of-being as the highest achievement of analytic experience, proposing instead that the irreducible positivity of being-as-outcast represents a more honest confrontation with the Real.

Ethics of the Real: Kant and LacanAlenka Zupančič · 2000 (p.191)

what his position glorifies, rather, is the 'being of an outcast'. His existence is that of something cast off by the signifier, the 'spittle' of the signifier.

The phrase "cast off by the signifier" is theoretically loaded because it locates the outcast not within the signifier's constitutive lack (the ordinary condition of the speaking subject) but outside the signifying chain entirely; and the word "spittle" — a bodily remainder, something expelled and abject — specifies that this outside is not a neutral void but a positively produced residue, making the being of an outcast a real remainder of the symbolic operation rather than simply its negative.