The voluntaristic streak in Mari Ruti’s psychoanalytical art of living

I found Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character a remarkable book. It offers a psychoanalytical framing of the ‘art of living’: the classical notion that living well is fundamentally a practice which can be undertaken in better or worse ways. At the core her conception is the Lacanian notion of the Thing: the primordial lost object which dimly echoes in the mundane objects which we desire.

In The Call of Character (2013) this is conceived of in terms of our sensitivity to the echo of the Thing. There are little slivers of the sublime we find in certain objects, which can give us direction in how we choose to live. What matters is cultivating a sensitivity to that echo, to better discern when we hear the call and when we do not. It’s only through doing so that we can be faithful to our own desire.

In The Creative Self (2025)* this is conceived of in terms of placing the glow into these objects. Lacan’s phrase about raising mundane object to the dignity of the Thing is taken quite literally at points, as if there is a choice about when and how we do this. It’s still acknowledged that we find objects with this sliver already embedded but Ruti says that “many forms of creativity are a matter of generating this glow” (loc 324). Particularly towards the end of her section, Ruti argues that we need to be discerning about which objects we raise in this way. We should be highly selective: “Not all objects should qualify; the objects in question should have something genuinely special about them” (loc 2105). I can see three different relations being posited here:

It’s 3 which troubles me. If it’s a question of which objects should qualify it implies that our raising an object to the dignity of the Thing is a voluntaristic action. We choose what to elevate in a concrete way, with the corollary that sometimes our choices are mistaken. I don’t understand what this choice entails though: the examples Ruti cites draws heavily on Marion Milner’s creative practice which I read as much more to do with 1 i.e. cultivating qualities of attention which enable us to discover the echo/glow in the mundane objects of the world. What 3 shares with 2 is a subtle voluntarism which I think sits uneasily with the psychoanalytical logic of the argument. I also don’t think it fits Ruti’s own account of her personal experience of creativity which has much more in keeping with the receptive unconscious rather than a purposeful practice of sublimation.

I see why Ruti wants to do this, I think. It provides a critical vantage point in which something like existential authenticity can be a bulwark against the siren song of consumer capitalism. The problem is that I don’t think it works. I think the psychoanalytical logic is betrayed by the political uses to which it is put. This is not to say that I don’t think psychoanalysis has political implications. Clearly it does. But I don’t think it can be used to provide the foundation for a critical theory. Or at least not as neatly as Ruti is trying to do.

As you can tell from the last few days of blogging, this point is bugging me. I want to emphasise that I love Ruti’s work. This has been a revelation to me. But the reason why I never found critical theory deploying psychoanalysis intellectually satisfying in the past remains the case here, albeit in a more subdued way.

*This is written with Gail Newman but they seem to have written their sections individually.

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Do I discover the Thing’s glow or do I place it there?

Following from yesterday’s more extensive blog post, I was a bit taken aback by Mari Ruti’s statement here in The Creative Self loc 314:

We can be guided to the Thing’s glow by people—artists, creators, and inventors of various kinds—who possess a stronger than average capacity to either extract it from an already existing object or to install it in an object that they create from scratch. Lacan’s example of the latter phenomenon is the manner in which Cézanne paints apples. Lacan claims that an apple painted by Cézanne is never merely a simple depiction of an apple but, rather, contains an aura of a mysteriousness that viewers respond to. While Cézanne’s apples do not give us the “Thing-in-itself,” they grant us a little taste of the Thing’s sublimity.

Are the words ‘extract’ and ‘install’ uncharacteristically poor choice from this usually careful writer? Or does Ruti intend the active connotation these words carry? To me they suggest an agent deliberately seeking to bring about an outcome through their engagement with the object, as opposed to this outcome being a byproduct of the interaction. It’s the difference between “the Thing’s glow” emerging as a consequence of a creative process and someone setting out to “make something sublime”.

I’m possibly overdrawing the distinction to make the point but I feel slightly allergic to the idea we could characterise this in such an active register. Creativity to me involves a form of surrender, centering what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious, rather than ‘extraction’ and ‘installation’. Furthermore, these two phrases sit oddly with each other, given that the former identifies a residue in the object whereas the latter puts it there in the first place. In Ruti’s defence she’s talking about the capacity of a person to do this rather than suggesting that’s the intention of the process. But I do think there’s an underlying assumption of activity in her conceptual architecture here which I fundamentally don’t agree with. For example from loc 342:

Although there may be something about the object itself that makes it a good candidate for serving as a vessel for the objet a, it is we, ourselves, who unconsciously place the objet a within this object. Yet the fact that we are the architects of our own desire does not decrease the relevant object’s ability to draw us in with an inexplicable, irresistible force. We may even come to value it so highly that our desire for it feels nonnegotiable. In other words, due to the hidden link between the Thing and the objet a—the fact that the objet a contains a smidgeon of the Thing’s aura and therefore always in the final analysis refers back to the Thing—our desire for an object that seems to contain the objet a can become so strong that we are willing to sacrifice a great deal for it.

Do we unconsciously place the objet a within the object? I’m not sure that’s the case. I think in any given moment we are constituted as a being for whom the objet a is already within the object. To talk about unconsciously placing it there suggests that we are doing that, almost as a form of projection, it’s simply that we don’t know that we are doing it. Whereas I took Lacan to be saying something more unsettling: that I am someone who cannot help but be drawn in and that the question is simply how I relate to that power exercised upon me. To talk about ‘unconscious placing’ misconstrues a structural relation as a psychodynamic one.

There’s a latent volunteerism here which changes how we relate to the receptive unconscious. If we are ‘placing’ then it carries the promise we might learn to place differently, as opposed to remaining with what emerges through the structured relation to the world and changing through our engagement with what emerges. It’s staying with what happens to you rather than locating yourself as the source of what happens. It also changes the relation to the question I’m preoccupied by: why do I feel the Thing’s glow in this object and not another? If it’s unconscious placement the question becomes abut the psychodynamic pattern of my projection of the sublime onto the world. If it’s a consequence of the structural relation, the question becomes about how I was constituted as a being who feels the call of the Thing where I do. The latter question is significantly broader in the scope than the former and that matters.

I find this uncomfortable because ‘unconscious placement’ is easier to incorporate into a biographical frame. What in my past disposes me to unconsciously place the glow in this way? In contrast the structural frame becomes far more diffuse even as it lends itself more clearly to empirical objects: what is the call I feel in relation to the glow of thing? How do I relate to that call? How does it lead me to act? How might I act differently? What are the resources which might support such different responses?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@limebar/116534323781980770

Ngl, when I saw this picture I thought "The Thing, mid-transformation."

What Thing am I talking about?

The one by John Carpenter, of course.

#TheThing #JohnCarpenter