Pleasure in Failure: The Guilty Subject in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Austin

THE QUESTION OF THE DESIRE TO “BE” has given concern to a number of important texts on subjectivity. Subjectification can be the lure of a cultural image, the violence of domination, or the seduction of pleasure. From Freud to Althusser, that question has continually problematized rather than concluded their inquiries. One is struck, for example, in the chapter on conscience in Civilization and Its Discontents, by the strange pleasure the ego secures for itself over and against its repetitions of self-enacted punish ment. Somehow, the very corrective and prohibitive mechanism of the superego becomes coveted as the possibility of repeated transgressions. In Althusser’s scene of interpellation, the subject again survives subjectification in misrecognizing itself in the hailing. The desire of the subject, it appears, is always held elsewhere. The task of this paper, however, is not to follow a psychoanalytical trajectory. Rather, I wish to give thought to a different possibility in considering the question of subjectification. My question has to do with what keeps the subject in thrall-arrested, seduced, and interested-in the moment of its subjectification. My choice of texts-Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Austin-is oriented towards a reading of conscience as promise, of Being as a contractual possibility, and of the necessity of human bondage to guilt and failure.