Secondary literature 2014

The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living

Mari Ruti

by Mari Ruti (2014)

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Synopsis

Mari Ruti's The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living (2014) mounts a sustained argument that the constitutive lack at the heart of human subjectivity—theorized primarily through Lacan's concept of das Ding and the lost object—is not an existential tragedy to be managed or overcome, but the very productive condition that sustains desire, creativity, and the ongoing self-fashioning of character. The book is organized around three interlocking "arts": self-fashioning (the construction of singularity through desire), self-responsibility (the ethical demands imposed by unconscious repetition and relational alterity), and self-surrender (the opening to events, love, and immanent transcendence that periodically transport us beyond social habituation). Against contemporary therapeutic culture's injunction toward serenity, adjustment, and the elimination of anxiety, Ruti argues that anxiety, suffering, and existential vulnerability are intrinsic to character rather than obstacles to it. Drawing on Lacan's Seminar VII, Freud's repetition compulsion, Nietzsche's amor fati, and Badiou's concept of the event, Ruti insists that the "echo of the Thing" in particular objects and activities—not any final satisfaction—is what animates a singular ethical life. The book is deliberately written at the boundary between academic theory and accessible ethical reflection, seeking to rescue Lacanian concepts from both self-help trivialization and academic obscurantism, and to redirect them toward a livable, immanent ethics of desire.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes The Call of Character in the Lacanian corpus is its sustained, non-defeatist elaboration of das Ding as an ethical resource rather than a melancholic limit. Most Lacanian-inflected readings of the Thing—including Žižek's political deployments—treat it primarily as the structuring absence that exposes the impossibility of social closure. Ruti, by contrast, redirects the logic of the Thing's "echo" toward a positive, lived ethics of singularity: it is not the Thing's irrecoverability that matters most, but the idiosyncratic way in which particular subjects are drawn to its resonance in specific objects, activities, relationships, and ideals. This move allows Ruti to theorize character not as essence but as an ongoing, historically situated process of becoming shaped by the specificity of one's desire—a synthesis of Lacanian structural analysis with Nietzschean self-fashioning that is unusual in the secondary literature.

The book also makes a distinctive contribution by integrating the Lacanian ethics of desire (drawn largely from Seminar VII) with Badiou's concept of the truth-event and Freud's repetition compulsion in a single ethical framework oriented toward everyday life. While much of the corpus uses Lacan to think political subjectivity or textual/cinematic analysis, Ruti deploys these concepts to address questions of intimate relationships, creative work, therapeutic ideology, and the politics of health and happiness. The result is a book that speaks simultaneously to the ethics of psychoanalysis, to the critique of neoliberal self-improvement culture, and to a broadly accessible philosophy of the "good life"—an unusual triptych in Lacanian-oriented scholarship. Finally, Ruti's willingness to critically engage and partially correct Žižek on the ethics of empathy and identification, while incorporating Butler's precariousness framework, gives the book an unusual sensitivity to social power differentials within what might otherwise remain a purely formal psychoanalytic ethics.

Main themes

Lack as productive condition of desire and character rather than deficit to overcome
Das Ding and the echo of the lost object as the engine of singular self-fashioning
Anxiety as constitutive of singularity and resistance to social normalization
The repetition compulsion as obstacle to and occasion for ethical self-transformation
Critique of therapeutic and neoliberal ideologies of health, happiness, and serenity
The Badiouian event as summons to character beyond social conformity
Relational alterity and the ethics of interpersonal responsibility under unconscious opacity
Immanent transcendence and the 'erotics of being' as worldly alternatives to metaphysical escape
The tension between social persona and singular character
Amor fati and self-fashioning as an aesthetic and ethical practice

Chapter outline

Preface — p.xi-xiv
Chapter 1: The Call of Character (Part I: The Art of Self-Fashioning) — p.2-19
Chapter 2: The Process of Becoming — p.22-38
Chapter 3: The Specificity of Desire — p.40-62
Chapter 4: The Repetition Compulsion (Part II: The Art of Self-Responsibility) — p.64-77
Chapter 5: The Alchemy of Relationality — p.80-98
Chapter 6: The Ethics of Responsibility — p.99-118
Chapter 7: The Swerve of Passion (Part III: The Art of Self-Surrender) — p.120-141
Chapter 8: The Art of Living with Anxiety — p.142-158
Chapter 9: The Erotics of Being — p.159-175

Chapter summaries

Preface (p.xi-xiv)

The preface establishes the book's three governing interventions and its unusual rhetorical register. Ruti announces that she will argue against three comforting but false assumptions: that selfhood is essentially given, that existential equilibrium is both realistic and desirable, and that desire can be tamed or safely managed. In place of these, she proposes that selfhood is constructed through ongoing engagement with the world, that the turbulence of desire and anxiety is the precondition rather than the enemy of a life worth living, and that character—understood as the idiosyncratic intonation of one's desire—is the proper ground of an ethics of self-fashioning.

The preface also positions the book in deliberate tension with two failure modes: the self-help genre's evacuation of complexity, and academic theory's tendency toward rhetorical inaccessibility. Ruti describes the book as an attempt to distill difficult theoretical ideas—drawn primarily from Lacanian psychoanalysis, Freudian drive theory, Nietzsche, and Badiou—into accessible prose without sacrificing the genuine difficulty of the concepts involved. The three-part structure of the book (the arts of self-fashioning, self-responsibility, and self-surrender) is previewed, and Ruti's notion of 'transcendence' as a worldly, immanent phenomenon—not an escape from daily life but a renewed and more singular engagement with it—is introduced for the first time.

Chapter 1: The Call of Character (Part I: The Art of Self-Fashioning) (p.2-19)

The opening chapter establishes the book's central tension: between the publicly legible 'persona' and the singular, often socially resistant 'character' that animates genuine desire. Ruti begins by noting the cultural tendency to construe character as a fixed, hidden essence to be unveiled through self-interrogation. She complicates this picture by insisting that character is not a pre-given truth but a mode of living and relating—an existential path rather than a buried treasure. Authenticity, on this account, is not the liberation of a pre-formed self but the ongoing fidelity to the specificities of one's desire even when this complicates social life.

A crucial argument of the chapter concerns the relationship between desire and the drives. Ruti distinguishes between desire (historically sedimented, relatively coherent, to some degree knowable) and the drives (more amorphous, less socialized, capable of overwhelming the subject's defenses). Character expresses both, which is why genuinely hearing its call produces not composure but a degree of existential bewilderment—what the culture tends to label 'anxiety.' Ruti directly contests the cultural overvaluation of serenity and the therapeutic injunction to eliminate anxiety, arguing instead that agitation is a precondition of character's actualization. The inability to suppress passion's overflow is not a fatal flaw but the sign that one is in contact with the most vital strata of one's being.

The chapter closes by making desire indispensable not only to individual life but to science, justice, and cultural production more broadly. Even those endeavors most committed to objectivity require passion's vitalizing current to progress. This allows Ruti to reframe the entire self-help project: rather than managing or minimizing desire, the task is to augment and refine character by remaining faithful to desire's call. Notable examples: religious asceticism sliding into fanaticism; groundbreaking scientists and lawmakers with 'vision'

Chapter 2: The Process of Becoming (p.22-38)

This chapter addresses the nature of character formation by staging a debate between essentialist and constructivist accounts of selfhood, firmly siding with the latter while acknowledging the genuine constraints imposed by biology, social class, race, gender, and historical circumstance. Ruti invokes Nietzsche's question—'How does one become who one is?'—to frame the view that character is fashioned through ongoing, constrained engagement with the world rather than discovered as a pre-given core. The self-as-poet metaphor (drawn from Nietzsche and used throughout the book) establishes that life can be treated as a work of art, but always within a specific set of material and historical obstacles.

A crucial move is Ruti's critique of collectively conditioned desire. The chapter argues that cultural norms, family expectations, and social rewards colonize desire so thoroughly that subjects lose track of the specificity of their desire and mistake inherited patterns of appreciation for genuine wanting. Authenticity, under these conditions, requires actively distinguishing one's singular desire from socially endorsed desires—a process that can demand wading against the current of collective expectation. The 'singularity' of character is thus always at risk of being eroded by conformist forms of desire, a structural problem that cannot be solved once and for all but must be repeatedly renegotiated.

Nietzsche's amor fati is introduced as a model for 'owning' one's history: accepting that the painful and the joyful alike have contributed to who one is, rather than suppressing or disavowing either. This is explicitly contrasted with the American-dream ideology of unlimited self-reinvention. Ruti proposes that existential vulnerability—the openness to outside influences that makes the self always already incomplete—is a gift rather than a deficit, because it is the precondition of ongoing self-evolution and increasing complexity of character.

Chapter 3: The Specificity of Desire (p.40-62)

This is the book's most densely Lacanian chapter, developing the concept of das Ding (the Thing) as the structural engine of desire and creativity. Ruti begins with the claim that lack is the precondition of desire: it is because we feel perpetually unfinished, because something is irrecoverably missing, that we are motivated to invent or discover objects that might alleviate our inner void. She is careful to distinguish this ontological lack from circumstantial socioeconomic deprivation, while acknowledging that the two interact in complex ways.

Lacan's account of socialization as the shattering of infantile narcissistic wholeness is introduced: the lost paradise designated as 'the Thing' is the fantasized state of plenitude prior to separation, which the subject spends a lifetime pursuing through substitute objects. Every object of desire is, in Lacan's phrase, a 'refound object'—always already a substitute for the original Thing. The objects that feel most compelling are those that carry the strongest echo of the Thing's special radiance. This framework explains both the productivity of desire (the endless invention of new objects, values, and meanings) and its compulsive dimension (the repetition of the quest because no substitute can fully satisfy).

The chapter also addresses the ethical and social dimensions of the Thing's logic. Language is theorized as a privileged medium through which the echo of the Thing can be repeatedly revived and organized—a relatively benign anchor for the foundational lack that also offers trauma survivors a distancing mechanism. Against social power's tendency to silence singular desire and replace it with purely conventional yearning, the Thing's echo is described as having the capacity to 'trump' such normalization precisely because of its idiosyncratic, non-fungible character. The chapter closes with a discussion of the ethics of endowing mundane objects with 'the dignity of the Thing'—Lacan's formulation for sublimation—as the practical form of an ethical life. Notable examples: religion as substitute for the lost Thing; addictions as failed attempts to fill the void; language and trauma narrativization

Chapter 4: The Repetition Compulsion (Part II: The Art of Self-Responsibility) (p.64-77)

Moving from the structural logic of desire to its psychic vicissitudes, this chapter examines how early relational experiences solidify into unconscious 'blueprints of behavior' that structure adult desire through the repetition compulsion. Ruti draws on Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle to show that these unconscious fixations are not merely passive residues but actively shape the field of possible objects and relational scenarios the subject finds compelling. The paradox is that the more obstacles there are to a desire's smooth satisfaction, the more the compulsion thrives—as in cases where subjects repeatedly choose partners who replicate early scenes of rejection or incomprehension.

The chapter's ethical pivot is the argument that the repetition compulsion is not destiny. By intervening in unconscious patterns—metabolizing rather than merely enduring or unconsciously reenacting past trauma—the subject can refashion desire toward a more audible echo of the Thing. This process is understood as an essential component of the 'art of living': without the capacity to break repetitive patterns, attempts at self-constitution remain superficial. Ruti insists, however, that this intervention is not a matter of willpower or rational decision but of sustained engagement with the historically driven character of one's behavior.

Ruti also introduces a limit on the ethics of self-fashioning: the claim that there are two asymmetric levels of vulnerability—a universal existential vulnerability shared by all, and a socially distributed vulnerability that is unevenly amplified by structural oppression. The rhetoric of self-overcoming, however inspiring, cannot be universalized in a way that ignores the material conditions under which different subjects operate. Pain, in this account, is not the antithesis of character but one of its reinforcements: the capacity to tolerate and metabolize suffering is a measure of existential resilience rather than a mark of failure. Notable examples: dating a man who replicates a rejecting father; marrying a woman who replicates a mother's emotional recoil

Chapter 5: The Alchemy of Relationality (p.80-98)

This chapter examines how intimate relationships function as crucibles of character formation, capable of both unlocking repressed dimensions of the self and constricting or depleting it. Ruti begins from Arendt's observation that we depend on others for the confirmation of our identity, but complicates this by noting that we are inserted into webs of relationality where invisible currents of others' unconscious blueprints crisscross in unpredictable ways. The relational encounter thus involves not only conscious intentions but the full weight of both parties' unprocessed repetition compulsions.

The positive dimension of this relational exposure is that intimate relationships can unlock repressed facets of character—love in particular is described as extending a 'generous summons to the clandestine sediments of personality' that have been marginalized or suppressed. At their best, intimate relationships allow subjects to experience freer, less rigid versions of themselves, breaking the false self-presentations designed to protect against injury. A lover's caress, a mentor's pressure, a friend's encouragement can animate frequencies of being that remain dormant in isolation.

However, the chapter also mounts a sustained critique of the cultural overvaluation of relationality. Ruti argues that the ideological equation of intimate relationships with healing, happiness, and self-completion produces a distorted hierarchy in which having a relationship is valued over its quality, and solitude is stigmatized as a deficient antechamber to partnership. Against this, she argues that solitude can itself be a condition for authentic self-connection and creativity, and that bad relationships actively constrict desire and deplete subjectivity. The chapter closes with a nuanced account of desire's inherent mobility—including 'partially unreadable' desires oriented toward an unspecified future—as a legitimate and potentially character-expanding mode of desiring. Notable examples: lover's caress enabling self-recovery; escape from a relationship as expression of desire

Chapter 6: The Ethics of Responsibility (p.99-118)

The central ethical chapter of the book confronts the problem of how unconscious motivation and the repetition compulsion bear on interpersonal ethics—specifically, how we can be held responsible for behavior that originates from unconscious scripts we cannot fully see or control. Ruti refuses the exculpatory move of attributing harm to the unconscious: precisely because unconscious inclinations are powerful and persistent, the ethical demand is not reduced but intensified. Inner opacity is not an excuse but an invitation to greater self-vigilance and accountability.

Ruti critically engages Žižek's argument that an ethics based on empathy and identification is inherently fallacious because it relies on the fiction of commonality and collapses when confronted with the 'monstrous' other or the utterly dehumanized victim. She grants Žižek's diagnostic point but resists his conclusion, turning instead to Butler's framework of shared human precariousness and vulnerability as a more adequate, if still tenuous, ethical foundation for relationality. The shared condition of self-opacity—of being constitutively unable to give a full account of oneself—is proposed as a basis for solidarity rather than an obstacle to ethical life.

The chapter also takes aim at the ideology of 'living in the now,' arguing that this popular therapeutic injunction is ethically confused because it underestimates the power of the past to shape present behavior through the return of the repressed. Genuine ethical responsibility requires remaining cognizant of the historically driven character of one's conduct—not in order to be enslaved to the past, but in order to be capable of intervening in its compulsive repetitions. The chapter closes by distinguishing between the asymmetric social distribution of forgiveness (those in power are forgiven for transgressions more readily than the disempowered) and the cases where forgiving too easily amounts to condoning brutality. Notable examples: suicide bomber and the limits of empathy; Agamben's Muselmann as limit case of ethical response; abusive husbands and the limits of exculpation by unconscious motivation

Chapter 7: The Swerve of Passion (Part III: The Art of Self-Surrender) (p.120-141)

This chapter introduces Badiou's concept of the 'event' as a structuring frame for thinking the most powerful modality of character's call: the experience of being summoned to something beyond the routines of social life. Drawing on Badiou's Ethics and Being and Event, Ruti argues that the event—whether experienced as falling in love, creative inspiration, political commitment, or prophetic vocation—suspends the organized structure of habitual identity and activates those dimensions of being that have not been entirely domesticated by social norms. The event is explicitly linked to the Lacanian logic of das Ding: it carries that 'more than' quality associated with the Thing's echo, breaking repetition compulsions and opening the subject to genuinely new forms of investment.

Ruti is attentive to the existential difficulty of sustaining fidelity to an event. The experience of being called by an event is characterized by an excess of both promise and agitation—a combination of thrill and threat that can feel 'overstimulating to the point of agony.' The chapter discusses the appeal of 'reasonable lives' as a defense against the event's destabilizing force, and the structural tension between the needs of character (which are served by the event) and the needs of the social persona (which favor stability and predictability). Importantly, Ruti suggests that many of our current investments may themselves be the residue of prior events that have gradually lost their vitalizing force.

The chapter also contextualizes the swerve of passion within the broader crisis of meaning in late-capitalist society. Ruti draws on Adorno to argue that the homogenization of desire by consumer capitalism produces both nihilism (the inability to feel committed to anything) and a pragmatic complacency that reduces aspiration to material success. The event is proposed as the strongest available counter-force to this homogenization: it is that which, by definition, carries an excess that cannot be absorbed into the market's logic of substitutable satisfactions. Notable examples: Plato's lover as madman; mystics penetrated by messianic power; artists in states of creative 'flow'; abandoning a promising career for a riskier one

Chapter 8: The Art of Living with Anxiety (p.142-158)

This chapter develops the book's most sustained engagement with anxiety as a constitutive and productive—rather than merely pathological—dimension of singularity. Ruti opens with an extended critique of society's 'fixation on the notion that we should attain perfect health of both body and mind,' drawing on Adorno's argument that the normalization of health conceals a 'tragic kind of discreet death: the demise of everything that is eccentric and messy about human life.' The medicalization of risk, the surveillance of the body, and the injunction to eliminate all unclassifiable symptoms are presented as forms of social regulation that suppress the constitutive lack and finitude intrinsic to human desire.

Against this backdrop, Ruti theorizes anxiety as the underside of singularity: it is what persists when the most asocial, least normalized dimensions of being push through the social surface. Purging anxiety would mean purging the most resistant strata of character. The chapter introduces the concept of 'anchors' for desire—love, professional aims, creative endeavors, higher ideals—as means of harnessing the energy of anxiety without eliminating it. These anchors do not deny anxiety but contain it sufficiently to prevent it from overwhelming the subject. Crucially, they also require the capacity to mourn previous incarnations of the self and to translate past wisdom into resources for future living.

Ruti closes the chapter by invoking Adorno's 'awkward, embarrassing gesture' and Arendt's daimon—the inimitable aura implicit in gesture, speech, and action that tells others 'who' rather than 'what' one is—as images of character's irreducible singularity. Anxiety is identified as one facet of the excessive, immoderate compilation of energy that infuses life with vitality. Rather than being the enemy of a well-lived life, anxiety is 'what reminds us of what it means to want what we may have forgotten to want.' Notable examples: Adorno on normalizing health; Tim Dean on medicalization of risk; Arendt's daimon; Adorno's awkward embarrassing gesture; Phoenix metaphor

Chapter 9: The Erotics of Being (p.159-175)

The final chapter brings together the book's arguments by proposing an 'erotics of being'—a concept that redirects the Lacanian economy of desire and the Thing toward immanent, worldly satisfaction rather than transcendent escape. Ruti argues that fantasies of otherworldly transcendence (religious, metaphysical, or perfectionist) actually impoverish the world by motivating subjects to chase an idealized beyond, thereby becoming negligent of the ways in which the sublime already resides within the crevices of the everyday. The chapter mounts a critique of perfectionism as a displaced form of the same logic: whether pursuing the perfect body, dissertation, child, or company, worldly perfectionism forecloses the immanent transcendence it claims to seek.

The 'erotics of being' names a practice of attentiveness to those objects, activities, and encounters in daily life that carry the echo of the Thing—moments in which the subject is transported beyond routine self-consciousness without leaving the world. Drawing on Badiou's event, Bollas's concept of the day as a container of potential, and Barthes's punctum, Ruti theorizes these moments of disclosure as the practical form of a life worth living. The chapter pays particular attention to creative work—specifically writing—as an exemplary case of the dialectical oscillation between the mundane (the boring labor of craft) and the inspired (the sudden leap of insight that makes everything click into place).

The chapter also argues that the erotics of being requires tolerating anxiety as a productive background condition rather than achieving composure. Choosing character-resonant objects and activities—making the micro-decisions of daily life with fidelity to the Thing's echo—is presented as the practical ethical task that synthesizes all three 'arts' of the book: self-fashioning, self-responsibility, and self-surrender. The book closes with the suggestion that it is precisely when we stop searching for meaning outside of life that we have a real chance of finding it within its immanent, always partially unreadable texture. Notable examples: spiritual practices as anchors for desire rather than eliminators of it; writing and creative process as erotics of being; Bollas's 'day as container of potential'; Barthes's punctum

Main interlocutors

Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Alain Badiou, Being and Event
Alain Badiou, Ethics
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
Judith Butler, Precarious Life
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Slavoj Žižek
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
Tim Dean
Jean Laplanche
Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Heidegger, Being and Time
Kant, Critique of Judgment

Position in the corpus

The Call of Character occupies a distinctive position in the secondary Lacanian literature as a work that explicitly bridges academic psychoanalytic theory and accessible ethical philosophy. Its closest neighbors are Ruti's own The Summons of Love (2011, Columbia), which shares the same publisher, rhetorical register, and concern with love and desire, and A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living — works that collectively constitute Ruti's project of translating Lacanian concepts into lived ethics. More broadly, the book shares terrain with works that use Seminar VII's ethics of desire as a platform for thinking singularity against social normalization, including Alenka Zupančič's Ethics of the Real and Lorenzo Chiesa's work on subjectivity and the drive. However, unlike those more strictly theoretical works, Ruti consistently foregrounds the question of how such ethics bears on daily experience, intimate relationships, creativity, and psychological suffering. Readers who have worked through Žižek's deployments of das Ding in The Sublime Object of Ideology or The Plague of Fantasies will find Ruti's treatment usefully complementary and critically differentiated: she explicitly resists Žižek's tendency toward a purely negative or aporetic account of the Thing's logic, insisting instead on its positive, generative dimension for self-fashioning.\n\nIn terms of reading order, those approaching the corpus from a psychoanalytic-ethical angle would benefit from reading Lacan's Seminar VII and Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle before this book, as Ruti's arguments presuppose familiarity with these texts even when she glosses them accessibly. After The Call of Character, readers interested in pursuing its Badiouian strand should turn to Badiou's Ethics directly; those interested in the political and feminist dimensions of the vulnerability ethics sketched in chapter 6 should turn to Butler's Precarious Life and Giving an Account of Oneself. The book is particularly well-suited as an entry point for readers coming from philosophy, ethics, or literary studies who are not yet fully at home in Lacanian psychoanalysis, and as a bridge text for clinicians or theorists who want to think the ethics of desire in terms of livable, everyday practices rather than formal structural analysis alone.