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Mari Ruti is an associate professor of critical theory at the University of Toronto with a long-standing interest in psychoanalysis, having contributed to this journal and participated in annual meetings of the American
Psychoanalytic Association. She is the author of several scholarly books and papers, mostly related to her attempt to sort out the implications of post-Lacanian studies in contemporary critical theory. Her paper “The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within” (2010), the basis of the book under review, was awarded the JAPA prize.
Ruti's work reflects the verve and intellectual passion of the authors she engages: the pioneering feminist philosopher Judith Butler; the omnipresent Slovenian Marxist-Lacanian Slovaj Žižek; the theologian-ethicist Eric Santner; the Parisian philosopher and playwright Alain Badiou; the radical queer theorist Lee Edelman; the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič; and many others. This otherwise diverse group share an interest in building upon the conceptual innovations of Jacques Lacan, the key work being Lacan's seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. In The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within, Ruti presents her own, more humanistic version of ethics in what has been an ongoing dialogue with the post-Lacanians. She has written a dense and intense work, illuminating a range of difficult ideas and raising a challenge to radical strains of ethical theory that she considers dead ends.
The problem can be summarized briefly. Human beings are biological creatures integrated from birth into a hegemonic symbolic system of rules and power structures that determine the course of their individual lives. To define themselves, they must have recourse to the terms given them, which implicitly validate the assumptions of the systems that perpetuate them, what she refers to as an “irremediable disempowerment” (p. 108) that “colonizes” the living being (p. 113). At their core, however, human subjects carry a piece o