Secondary literature 2012

The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within

Mari Ruti

by Lacan, Jacques_ Lacan, Jacques_ Ruti, Mari (2012)

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Synopsis

Mari Ruti's The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (2012) sets out to locate the concept of singularity—what remains of a subject after all its social predicates and symbolic identifications have been stripped away—within the Lacanian real, and to argue that this singularity need not be accessed exclusively through acts of radical symbolic rupture (subjective destitution) but also through the creative reformulation of the symbolic from within. The book's central question is: how can a subject remain faithful to the irreducible kernel of its being—its drive-energies, its fundamental fantasy, its sinthome—without either dissolving entirely into the asocial void of the real or capitulating entirely to the hegemonic desire of the big Other? Ruti advances her argument in two coordinated movements: the first half (Part I) works through the ethics of the act via Žižek, Edelman, and Badiou, showing how each theorizes the subject's encounter with the impossible real as the site of ethical-political transformation; the second half (Part II) pivots to Lacan's theory of sublimation and his late seminar on Joyce, arguing that das Ding, the sinthome, and jouis-sens together ground an "ethics of sublimation" that complements rather than replaces the ethics of the act. Throughout, Ruti insists that jouissance is not merely what must be renounced for social life to be possible but also the inextinguishable "stain of infinity" that makes the subject something more than a piece of its world—an "immortal within the mortal"—and that any genuinely Lacanian ethics must account for this immortal dimension without either fetishizing destruction or abandoning the signifier's creative potential. The book concludes with an extended meditation on love, the other's face, and the limits of post-Lacanian universalism, mounting a pointed critique of Badiou's and Žižek's dismissal of victimhood, multiculturalism, and empathy as theoretically and politically inadequate.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes The Singularity of Being within the Lacanian secondary corpus is its sustained effort to hold the ethics of the act and the ethics of sublimation in productive tension, rather than privileging one as the sole or paradigmatic expression of Lacanian ethics. Most post-Lacanian ethical theory—as represented by Žižek, Edelman, and to some extent Zupančič—gravitates toward the act, the moment of subjective destitution, or the encounter with the death drive as the apex of ethical commitment. Ruti challenges this by showing that Lacan's own analysis of sublimation in Seminar VII, and his reading of Joyce in Seminar XXIII, authorize an alternative ethical orientation: one in which singularity is cultivated not by shattering the symbolic but by linking the sinthome (the irreducible real kernel of the subject) to the creative, polyvalent, jouissance-saturated possibilities of the signifier. This move allows Ruti to argue that Lacanian theory is more politically versatile than its revolutionary-act reading suggests, and that transformative politics within the symbolic is as authentically Lacanian as the pure act of symbolic rupture.

A second distinctive contribution is Ruti's explicit attention to what she calls the "social" dimension of singularity. Against the tendency to locate singularity in the asocial wilderness of the real—a tendency she finds in Edelman especially—she insists that the sinthome's jouissance can be woven into symbolic existence through sublimation, and that this is what Joyce exemplifies: a singular subject who does not forsake the signifier but makes it breathe to the rhythm of the real. This allows Ruti to reconcile, in a way few secondary texts attempt, the Lacanian, Foucauldian, and Derridean accounts of symbolic subversion, arguing that the real's rebelliousness and the signifier's creative overflow are two faces of the same process. Combined with her sustained critique of Badiou's and Žižek's universalism as insufficiently attentive to racial, gendered, and postcolonial subject positions—a critique she frames through the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment reversed onto the powerful—this makes the book an unusually politically engaged and self-reflexive contribution to Lacanian ethics.

Main themes

Singularity as the irreducible real kernel of the subject beyond all social predicates
Jouissance as an inescapable 'stain of infinity' that prevents full symbolic assimilation
The ethics of the act versus the ethics of sublimation as complementary modes of fidelity to das Ding
Das Ding, repetition compulsion, and the trajectory of desire as the subject's psychic 'destiny'
The sinthome and jouis-sens as the site where the real animates rather than destroys the signifier
Sublimation as creative engagement with lack, raising mundane objects to the dignity of the Thing
The truth-event (Badiou) and the miraculous interpellation beyond ideology (Santner) as secular figures of transcendence
The 'immortal within the mortal': intimations of infinity through the real's eruption in the symbolic
Critique of post-Lacanian universalism (Badiou, Žižek) for excluding racial, gendered, and postcolonial subjects
Love as a privileged form of sublimation: the love object as refound Thing and site of ethical encounter with the other's singularity

Chapter outline

Introduction — p.1-23
1. The Singularity of Being — p.13-48
2. The Rewriting of Destiny — p.36-70
3. The Ethics of the Act — p.59-103
4. The Possibility of the Impossible — p.83-115
5. The Jouissance of the Signifier — p.105-136
6. The Dignity of the Thing — p.127-160
7. The Ethics of Sublimation — p.148-188
8. The Sublimity of Love — p.168-216
Conclusion: The Other as Face — p.189-216

Chapter summaries

Introduction (p.1-23)

Ruti opens by situating her project within the Lacanian tripartite of symbolic, imaginary, and real, arguing that while subjectivity is aligned with the symbolic and personality with the imaginary, singularity belongs to the real. Drawing on Eric Santner's formulation of the singular self as a 'nonnegotiable kernel of the real beyond all social predicates' and Levinas's notion of a 'perseverance in being' that escapes conceptual capture, she establishes the book's central claim: that singularity is not a function of imaginary individuality but of the drive-energies that ooze through the sieve of socialization. She explicitly marks the two-part structure of the book—a first half devoted to acts of symbolic rupture and a second to sublimation—and makes the methodological commitment that singularity must be theorized as capable of operating both against and within the symbolic order.

Crucially, Ruti introduces a key corrective to prevailing post-Lacanian readings: while she appreciates attempts to link singularity to subjective destitution, she argues that this approach risks universalizing alienation and foreclosing the possibility that singular resistance can emerge from within symbolic systems. Her discussion of Joyce in Seminar XXIII—where Lacan characterizes Joyce as singular precisely because he manipulates language in poetic, polysemic, and rebellious ways—anchors the thesis that the interface between the symbolic and the real, exemplified by sublimation, is the proper site of both singularity and resistance. This framing governs the entire book.

Key concepts: Singularity, Real, Symbolic, Jouissance, Sinthome, Sublimation Notable examples: James Joyce and Seminar XXIII; Santner's singular self; Levinas's 'perseverance in being'

1. The Singularity of Being (p.13-48)

The opening chapter grounds the book's conceptual architecture in the relationship between trauma, repetition, desire, and drive. Beginning with Lacan's contrast between Aristotle's science of character (deliberate habit formation) and psychoanalysis (the involuntary persistence of trauma), Ruti argues that the repetition compulsion functions as the 'rails' on which the subject's desire is irrevocably placed—a train that always returns to the same station regardless of the subject's conscious intentions. This is not mere mechanical repetition but the expression of the subject's deepest life-orientation, or what she calls its psychic 'destiny.'

The chapter elaborates the key structural relationship between desire, drive, and das Ding. Ruti shows, via Lacan's 'beautiful butcher's wife,' that desire and drive ultimately aim at the same impossible object: the Thing as a site of primordial (fantasized) loss. 'Empty' or 'mad' desires circle the Thing from a distance, while 'fuller' desires—those that remain faithful to the Thing—are agitated in the drive and attach themselves to objects that genuinely evoke it. This distinction between more and less 'true' desire will govern her later account of sublimation.

The chapter's most innovative move is its treatment of jouissance as a 'stain of infinity' that parasitizes the finite from within, citing Zupančič's argument that the absence of any 'beyond' does not enclose us within finitude but rather infinitizes it. The 'undeadness' of the drives (the lamella as an immortal libidinal force that survives every division) is aligned with singularity—not as a consoling concept, but as what prevents the subject from being fully absorbed by social assimilation. This undeadness is the same force that, in Santner's and Rosenzweig's accounts, differentiates the 'vampire' (bound to hegemonic investitures) from the 'daimon' (the miraculous singularizing force that ruptures them). Transcendence, for Ruti, is re-described as the eruption of the real within the symbolic—a secular, worldly phenomenon that engenders 'intimations of immortality.'

Key concepts: Singularity, Repetition, Jouissance, Das Ding, Death Drive, The Real Notable examples: Lacan's 'beautiful butcher's wife'; Santner's 'miracle'; Rosenzweig's vampire and daimon; The lamella as immortal life

2. The Rewriting of Destiny (p.36-70)

This chapter examines the ways in which unconscious fantasy formations become 'fate-defining'—binding the subject to a predetermined set of psychic scenarios that it reenacts without conscious awareness. Ruti distinguishes between active, life-giving fantasies (which, as Loewald argues, add imaginative richness to existence) and the passive, automatic fantasies that motivate behavior while bypassing rational agency. Lacan's contribution, she argues, is to show precisely how the latter imprison the subject by covering over its constitutive lack—and why dissolving them amounts to a genuine rewriting of psychic destiny.

A central concept here is Santner's 'validity in excess of meaning': the mysterious authority that the signifiers of the Other's desire exercise precisely because their meaning cannot be stabilized. This enigmatic surplus is what causes institutions of authority to secure our submission through rote citation and habitual allegiance rather than through rational persuasion—and what makes our relationship to symbolic authority simultaneously indebting and alienating. Ruti reads Greek tragedy, and particularly Oedipus, as Lacan does: as a paradigm for how we are 'born into a pre-existing symbolic constellation' that we are nonetheless asked to own as our destiny, while ignoring the drastically unequal distribution of fates.

Against the backdrop of oppression and social trauma, Ruti argues for two avenues of Lacanian resistance: the 'truth' of the subject's desire and the ethical act. The chapter's distinctive move is to reclaim the agency of the signifier: because it is trauma's 'resistance to signification' that transfers power to the Other, weaving a robust network of signifiers around traumatic experience is a way to reclaim agency. Analysis, understood as the analyst positioning herself as the 'cause of the analysand's desire'—a figure of the daimon replacing the vampire of fantasmatic fixation—is the site where this reclamation becomes possible. Ruti draws on Bruce Fink's account of the analytic process to show how the transference relationship can dissolve congealed fantasy formations and open 'the possibility for new possibilities.'

Key concepts: Fantasy, Repetition, Signifier, The big Other, Alienation, Interpellation Notable examples: Kafka's protagonists and the enigmatic Other; Oedipus as existential prototype; Fink on the Lacanian analytic process; Rosenzweig's daimon defeating the vampire

3. The Ethics of the Act (p.59-103)

The third chapter engages directly with Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis and the concept of the act as subjective destitution. Ruti begins with the distinction between the subject of desire (who stuffs successive objets a into its lack, always falling short of the Thing) and the subject of the drive (a 'headless' subject of jouissance who grazes the Thing directly). The fundamental fantasy, as the deep-seated repository of the subject's jouissance, cannot be dissolved through the talking cure—approaching it too closely causes the aphanisis of the subject, the collapse of symbolic identity. This is why the ethical act—the decision not to cede on one's desire—can, at its most radical, entail an encounter with the death drive and the destruction of the subject's social viability.

Ruti surveys three post-Lacanian theorizations of this encounter: Žižek's politics of the act as an uncompromising refusal of the big Other's demand; Edelman's sinthomosexuality as the queer subject's embrace of its figural alignment with the death drive and social abjection; and Santner's 'miracle' as an interpellation beyond ideological interpellation that releases congealed drive-energies. She is appreciative of each but also critical: Edelman's stance leaves no room for transformative political action; Žižek's valorization of 'divine violence' risks endorsing destructive acts (Norman's murder of Marion in Psycho, Che's execution of a traitor) that cannot properly be called ethical. Against these, Ruti aligns herself with the idea that ethics is not merely what results from a suicidal plunge into the real, but also what happens when we honor the truth of our desire even in less extreme ways—when we love someone of the 'wrong' race, class, or religion rather than submit to the 'service of goods.'

The chapter's most important structural claim is that the ethical act is the logical point at which desire, pursued to its limit, converges with the drive—and that subjective destitution is therefore the most radical, but not the only, expression of Lacanian ethics. The act shatters the points de capiton that suture the subject to the symbolic; for those whose quilting points are laced by oppressive signifiers, the act can break the repetition compulsion imposed by hegemonic meanings. But Ruti also notes, via Zupančič, that forcing the real to appear as a direct ethical goal collapses into terror: there is a crucial distinction between the terror inherent in encountering the real and terror as a strategy of compulsion.

Key concepts: The Act, Subjective Destitution, Sinthome, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Death Drive, Point de capiton Notable examples: Antigone's defiance of Creon; Rosa Parks as ethical actor; Mary Kay Letourneau case; Edelman's sinthomosexuality; Žižek on divine violence

4. The Possibility of the Impossible (p.83-115)

This chapter stages a sustained engagement with Badiou's theory of the truth-event and its relationship to Lacanian ethics, arguing that Badiou offers a more socially expansive reformulation of Lacan's ethics of the real than Žižek does. Badiou conceives of human existence as divided between the ordinary domain of interests (the 'situation') and the exceptional domain of truth-events—sudden ruptures that summon a 'some-one' into existence as a subject of truth, capable of transforming both self-perception and the structure of the world. Ruti draws the parallel with Lacan's act and Santner's miracle, but notes that where the social ramifications of the act are an afterthought for Lacan, for Badiou they are absolutely central: transformation within the social arena is not a potential by-product but the very criterion of a genuine act.

Ruti carefully explains Badiou's key concepts—the event, fidelity, ethical consistency, the temptation to betray the event, and the distinction between a genuine event and its simulacrum. She emphasizes the structural homology between the Lacanian injunction not to cede on one's desire and Badiou's ethics of fidelity: both identify self-betrayal as the gravest ethical failure, and both insist that the 'immortal' dimension of the subject—the capacity for transformation beyond the ordinary situational parameters—must be sustained against the coercive pull of the 'service of goods.'

The chapter also introduces important critical qualifications. Badiou's most dangerous weakness—also identified by Zupančič—is the proximity of the genuine event to its simulacrum: Nazism displays many of the formal characteristics of a truth-event while being, for Badiou, a paradigmatic evil, because it is organized around an identitarian 'national substance' rather than a universally applicable void. Ruti also defends Badiou's 'naming' of the real against Žižek's charge of ontologization, arguing that naming the void is by definition incomplete and non-totalizable, and that it has genuine political traction as a means of rendering the impossible conceivable. The chapter closes by positioning Badiou's reconceptualization of the real as nameable and reweavable into the symbolic as faithful to the spirit of the later Lacan—and as the bridge to the book's second half on sublimation.

Key concepts: The Act, Symbolic, Real, Jouissance, Ideology, Particularism Notable examples: Badiou's four domains of truth (art, science, love, politics); National Socialism as simulacrum; Haydn as evental site in baroque music; Saint Paul as universal subject

5. The Jouissance of the Signifier (p.105-136)

Part II opens by clarifying the fundamental disagreement between Žižek and Badiou about the relationship between the symbolic and the real, using this disagreement to motivate the book's second major argument: that the later Lacan reconceptualizes the real as capable of animating, rather than merely rupturing, the signifier, and that this reconceptualization authorizes an ethics of sublimation that complements the ethics of the act. Ruti argues that Žižek's persistent portrayal of the real as inassimilable to the symbolic—a 'bone in the throat' that the symbolic can never fully digest—leads him to overvalue revolutionary politics at the expense of transformative politics, and to conflate the signifier with the most repressive aspects of the symbolic order rather than recognizing it as a potential vehicle of creative and counterhegemonic meaning.

The conceptual pivot of the chapter is Lacan's late seminar on Joyce (Seminar XXIII). Ruti shows that, for the late Lacan, the sinthome is a peculiar kind of signifier that 'does not cease to write itself'—a site where jouissance overtakes the signifier without destroying it, producing jouis-sens (meaning saturated by enjoyment). Joyce's writing demonstrates that the real, when it penetrates the signifier rather than simply attacking it from outside, makes the signifier ferociously inventive: Joyce's epiphanic, formally dissociated language 'bites into bits of the real' (Harari) while remaining tethered to the signifier, thereby approaching psychosis without falling into it. Lacan's characterization of Joyce as 'the artist'—singular because he alone can assert 'the,' because he connects the symbolic with the sinthome—demonstrates that singularity can be achieved through creative linguistic innovation rather than only through symbolic rupture.

Ruti draws from this the key theoretical conclusion: singularity is a social rather than wholly asocial phenomenon. The sinthome's inexorable drive-energy can be linked to the signifier so that rebellious energies of the real become the engine of symbolic innovation. This reconciles the apparent opposition between Lacanian politics (valorizing the real's rupture of the symbolic) and Foucauldian/Derridean politics (valorizing the signifier's internal excess). Both processes—the real undermining the symbolic from within, and the signifier overflowing normative containment—are, Ruti argues, two sides of the same coin.

Key concepts: Sinthome, Jouissance, Signifier, Symbolic Order, Sublimation, Singularity Notable examples: James Joyce and Seminar XXIII; Jouis-sens; Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language; Žižek vs. Butler on symbolic dispossession

6. The Dignity of the Thing (p.127-160)

This chapter develops Lacan's theory of sublimation in Seminar VII, centering on the formula that sublimation 'raises the object to the dignity of the Thing.' Ruti argues that this formula names the uniquely human capacity to use the signifier (in the broadest sense) to invest mundane objects and representations with the aura of the lost Thing—and that this capacity is grounded in constitutive lack. It is because the Thing is fundamentally veiled, accessible only obliquely 'as something missed,' that we are compelled to encircle it through an endless series of creative substitutions. Lack and the possibility of filling it are, as Lacan argues through the image of the potter creating a vase ex nihilo around emptiness, introduced into the world simultaneously.

Ruti enriches this account with Kristeva's analysis of melancholia and sublimation: it is because we are haunted by the sadness of having lost the Thing that we are driven to reincarnate it through meaning-making, and sublimation's 'negation' of loss allows the subject to weave a 'hypersign' around the depressive void rather than being consumed by it. The chapter also examines how repetition functions as the motor of sublimation: because the drive can never attain its real aim (the Thing), its inhibition is, as Copjec argues, 'the very definition of sublimation,' and the variation that repetition demands is what fuels creativity. The fort-da game is read as the child's first act of sublimation—an attempt to fill the lack opened by the mother's absence.

Crucially, Ruti distinguishes between sublimatory objects that genuinely carry the Thing's echo and 'false objects' (the imaginary components of the objet a that eclipse das Ding). Consumer culture's 'injunction to enjoy' produces a surfeit of decoys that detach the subject from the truth of its desire. But she resists demonizing the entire symbolic universe: quilting points—symbolic ideals and values that anchor the subject in collective meaning—work best when they lend consistency to desire without arresting its movement. The chapter illustrates these arguments through Lacan's own examples: the decorative string of matchboxes (whose Erscheinung reveals the Thing within the utterly mundane), Cézanne's apples (which 'renew' the object's dignity by tapping into the mystery of the real), and the story of Ruth Kjar (whose depression is cured when she fills an empty space on her wall with a painting).

Key concepts: Das Ding, Sublimation, Lost Object, Objet petit a, Repetition, Signifier Notable examples: Lacan's matchbox ribbon; Cézanne's apples; Ruth Kjar case history; Fort-da game; Professor D's shoes; Jimmy Choo shoes

7. The Ethics of Sublimation (p.148-188)

Building directly on the previous chapter, Ruti makes her most systematic argument for sublimation as a genuine ethical orientation—one that Lacan explicitly links to ethics in Seminar VII ('We must now, therefore, consider the notion of creation with all it implies . . . because it is central, not only for our theme of the motive of sublimation, but also that of ethics in its broadest sense'). She argues that sublimation and the act are not opposed but are two points of resistance on a continuum from antisocial rebellion to meek social conformity: both express fidelity to the Thing, both pursue the truth of desire against the 'service of goods,' but while the act aims directly at the real and neutralizes the symbolic, sublimation aspires to reconfigure the symbolic by bringing morsels of jouissance into signification.

Ruti engages critically with Žižek and Butler as mirror-image failures of the same blind spot. Žižek's overvaluation of the suicidal act leads him to conflate the signifier with hegemonic power, missing the signifier's creative potential. Butler's discourse of 'dispossession'—the claim that we are irrevocably expropriated by the very language we are forced to use—is critiqued as covertly nostalgic for a self-possession that was never possible, and as failing to recognize that the Other's language also gives us the gift of sublimation (the capacity to create meaning from lack). Against both, Ruti distinguishes between the Other as site of hegemonic power and the signifier as tool of sublimatory capacity: it is through the signifier that we contest the Other's reality principle.

The chapter also analyzes Zupančič's 'crisis of sublimation'—our increasing inability to invest the world with sublime meaning, which results in the 'inexorable dictatorship of the reality principle.' Two symmetrical attitudes produce this crisis: the 'passion for the Real' (Žižek) that dismisses all symbolic formations as mere semblances, and poststructuralist nihilism (everything is convention, there is no real beyond language games). Both, Ruti argues, separate the sublime from the signifier—one by insisting the sublime can only be attained beyond signification, the other by denying any transcendent real. The ethics of sublimation holds the sublime within signification: sublimation is an ethical stance because it resists the reality principle by creating a space for objects and representations that have no place within the dominant symbolic order.

Key concepts: Sublimation, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Das Ding, Symbolic Order, Real, Ideology Notable examples: Lacan's contempt for Sade's lack of imagination; Butler's 'dispossession' critique; Zupančič's crisis of sublimation; The Heidegger-Lacan parallel on anxiety and authenticity; Dr. Phil on authentic selfhood

8. The Sublimity of Love (p.168-216)

The final chapter extends the ethics of sublimation to romantic love, arguing that love is the privileged—and most powerful—form of sublimation: the love object is the sublime object par excellence because it carries the echo of the missing Thing more convincingly than almost anything else. Ruti draws on Kaja Silverman's 'unique language of desire' to argue that our primordial loss generates a specific grammar of care, a configuration of passion that causes certain objects to resonate on the frequency of the Thing. The 'refound' quality of the love object—always a surrogate for what was never truly lost—explains why desire solidifies around it with an intensity that cannot be rationally accounted for.

The chapter examines the structural problems of narcissistic desire: its dependence on the chronic unavailability of the object, its idealization so extreme that it drains the object of independent integrity, and its tendency to generate aggression toward the object (Lacan: 'I love in you something more than you, the objet petit a—I mutilate you'). Narcissistic desire represents an ethical failure because it forecloses the unknowability of the other, reducing the other to a reassuring imaginary or symbolic likeness rather than confronting the other's real—its surplus jouissance, its internal alterity. Against narcissism, Ruti advocates a sublimatory love that can simultaneously hold the beloved as banal and as sublime—what Zupančič calls 'preserving the transcendence in the very accessibility of the other.'

The chapter then pivots to an extended engagement with post-Lacanian universalist ethics and its treatment of the other's face. Ruti defends a nuanced reading of Levinas against Žižek's critique, arguing that the Levinasian face already captures something of the other's nonrelational singularity rather than being merely an imaginary lure. But she agrees with post-Lacanians that ethical responsibility must extend beyond the face to the 'monstrous Thing' of the other's jouissance—including cases like the Muselmann, where the face has been emptied of all signs of human vitality. Ruti then mounts her most sustained political critique: Badiou's and Žižek's universalism, for all its claims to include the marginalized, is structurally biased toward white heterosexual masculinity. Their dismissal of feminism, racial politics, and queer theory as mere 'identity politics' reflects what she calls a reversed ressentiment—the powerful begrudging the jouissance of suffering attributed to the marginalized. She concludes that a genuinely Lacanian universalism must be grounded in singularity itself—the recognition that each subject is irreplaceable precisely as singular—and that this singularity is incompatible with the sweeping dismissal of victimhood, empathy, and the complex realities of multiculturalism.

Key concepts: Sublimation, Objet petit a, Das Ding, Narcissism, Universalism, Particularism Notable examples: Courtly love as paradigm of narcissistic sublimation; Lacan on Antigone's love for Polyneces; Badiou's critique of multiculturalism; The Muselmann as faceless face; Barthes on loving 'that he is'; Ressentiment of the powerful (Badiou and Žižek on feminism)

Conclusion: The Other as Face (p.189-216)

The conclusion synthesizes the book's two ethical orientations—the act and sublimation—through the lens of intersubjective ethics and the encounter with the other's face. Ruti engages Levinas's ethics of the face, Žižek's insistence that ethics must go 'beyond' the face to the impersonal Third of justice, and Santner's account of the other as bearer of an 'enigmatic density of desire' that is strange even to itself. She argues that post-Lacanian ethics cannot simply replace face-to-face ethics with impersonal justice: meeting the irreducible alterity of the other requires bringing one's own nonrelational surplus into a 'bizarre kind of relation' with the other's equally nonrelational surplus—relating to what, in principle, eludes relationality. The 'faceless face' of the Muselmann represents the ethical limit case: when the other's face has been emptied of all conventional signifiers of relational capacity, we are confronted with the pure materiality of the other as Thing, and the question of what ethical responsibility means at this zero-level becomes acute.

Ruti defends a qualified version of empathy against post-Lacanian scorn: the fact that we cannot fully comprehend the other's suffering does not mean we cannot touch some portion of it, and the fact that the other as Thing inevitably derails our attempts to relate on a 'human' level does not mean no human bond is possible. The book ends by defending a singularity-grounded universalism: one that does not erase differences in the name of an abstract Same, but insists that each singular subject—regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or postcolonial position—participates in the universal precisely as irreplaceable and incomparable.

Key concepts: Singularity, The big Other, Jouissance, Ideology, Subject, Universalism Notable examples: The Muselmann as ethical limit case; Levinas on the face as 'a being beyond all attributes'; Žižek's 'radical anti-Levinasian conclusion'; Butler on the face of the persecutor

Main interlocutors

Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII (The Sinthome)
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View
Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute
Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes
Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real
Alain Badiou, Ethics
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth
Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life
Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Lee Edelman, No Future
Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Roberto Harari, How James Joyce Made His Name
Lewis Kirshner, Having a Life: Self-Pathology after Lacan
Jonathan Lear
Franz Rosenzweig

Position in the corpus

The Singularity of Being occupies an unusual position in the Lacanian secondary corpus as a work that is simultaneously an interpretation of Lacanian ethics (particularly Seminar VII and Seminar XXIII) and a sustained political-ethical argument in its own right. Its closest neighbors are Zupančič's Ethics of the Real (which it cites extensively as a model for how to read Seminar VII seriously) and Žižek's political-ethical writings (which it engages as a primary interlocutor and frequent target of critique). It shares intellectual territory with Copjec's Imagine There's No Woman—both take sublimation seriously as an ethical category—but where Copjec's analysis is more narrowly focused on sexual difference and film, Ruti's is broader in scope, moving from clinical psychoanalysis through political philosophy to love and intersubjective ethics. Readers should come to this book having already engaged with Lacan's Seminar VII and Seminar XI, as well as with Žižek's Sublime Object of Ideology, Edelman's No Future, and Badiou's Ethics, since Ruti's argument is structured as a sustained critical dialogue with all of these.\n\nWhat makes Ruti's book distinctive among secondary texts is its explicit attempt to move beyond the ethical impasse generated by the fetishization of the act, offering sublimation as a politically and clinically viable alternative. Readers interested in the politics of post-Lacanian theory—particularly the debates around multiculturalism, universalism, and the politics of identity—should read this book alongside Badiou's Saint Paul, Santner's On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, and Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself. Those interested in the sinthome and the late Lacan should pair it with Harari's How James Joyce Made His Name. For clinical readers, the chapters on fantasy, destiny, and the rewriting of psychic fate (Chapters 2 and 3) provide one of the clearest secondary-literature accounts of how Lacanian analysis actually proposes to alter the subject's relationship to its symptoms.