Call of Character

The "call of character," as theorized by Mari Ruti in the source mari-ruti-the-call-of-character-living-a-life-worth-living-columbia-university-p, names the imperative dimension of singular desire — the way a subject's irreducibly personal desire makes a claim on that subject, summoning it toward a form of self-fashioning that cannot be reduced to culturally inherited patterns or collective norms. The concept is built on the Lacanian premise that constitutive lack — the structural gap that language installs in the subject — is not a wound to be healed but the very condition of possibility for desire and for the ongoing project of building a life. Because no master signifier can fully suture the subject, desire persists as an open, forward-directed movement; it is precisely this openness that Ruti re-articulates as a vocation or "call" — an internal orientation that has the force of an ethical demand without issuing from an external authority.

The second dimension of the concept is explicitly agonistic: to heed the call of character is to "wade against the current," meaning to resist the colonization of desire by socially conditioned patterns of appreciation and collectively sanctioned ways of living. This sets up character as the site where singularity must be actively defended against the normalizing pressure of the Other's desire. The concept thus fuses two Lacanian registers: the ontological (the subject is always structured by lack and constituted in the gap between need and demand) and the ethical (the only genuine guilt, from an analytic point of view, is surrendering that singular desire in favor of conformity — what Lacan calls giving ground relative to one's desire).

Within the source mari-ruti-the-call-of-character-living-a-life-worth-living-columbia-university-p, the "call of character" functions as the organizing thesis that holds together the book's post-Lacanian ethics of selfhood. It sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. It extends the Lacanian concept of Desire by giving lack a productive, forward-facing valence: rather than treating the irreducible gap as tragic, Ruti frames it as what keeps desire — and therefore character — alive. It directly instantiates the concept of Singularity, operationalizing the claim that Lacanian ethics asks us to "revere the utter singularity of our relationship to the Thing" (as noted in the canonical Singularity synthesis) by translating that reverence into an ethical imperative called the call. The concept also resonates with the Ethics of Psychoanalysis in that genuine guilt, for Ruti as for Lacan, consists in betraying one's desire rather than acting on it; the call of character is the positive name for what one must not abandon. Anxiety lurks structurally at the concept's edges: heeding the call means tolerating the very anxiety that arises when social supports and collective meanings are refused, when the lack is not filled by conformity. Finally, the concept implicitly addresses Self-Surrender and Jouissance as the twin dangers it opposes — the loss of singularity through absorption into collective patterns on one side, and the deadening repetition of purely symptomatic enjoyment on the other.

The concept is best understood as a specification and ethical extension of Lacanian Desire and Singularity rather than a critique of them. It applies the structural logic of the barred subject ($) — constituted by lack, sustained by desire — to the practical-ethical question of how a life ought to be oriented, coining "character" as the name for the particular shape a subject's singular desire carves out over time.

The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth LivingMari Ruti · 2014 (page unknown)

the only way to authentically respond to the call of our character is to wade against the current

The phrase "wade against the current" is theoretically loaded because it encodes the agonistic, anti-conformist structure of singular desire: "the current" figures the flow of collectively conditioned, Other-sponsored desire, and "wading against" it names the active, effortful labor required to maintain fidelity to one's own desire — exactly the move that the Ethics of Psychoanalysis identifies as the only real moral obligation. The word "authentically" further signals that mere nominal responsiveness to the call is insufficient; the concept demands a mode of engagement that cannot be simulated by social performance.