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Translating complex theory into a meaningful, comprehensible form accessible to a wide range of readers is a challenge that Mari Ruti has regularly taken on and met over the course of her writing career, to which body of work The Call of Character is a compelling addition. The book explores core concepts from Nietzsche, Lacan, Heidegger, Badiou, Žižek, Butler, and Adorno to tackle puzzles such as desire, character, repetition, trauma, suffering, love, conformity, interpersonal ethics, creativity, and meaning-making. In so doing, Ruti’s psychoanalytically informed study explores ideas and processes that offer access to ways of enacting the aim she expresses in the work’s subtitle: Living a life worth living.
In the preface, Ruti encapsulates her organizing theme: living life well means fostering the expression of character. This entails being aware of our desire and honoring it as fully as possible in a deeply ethical manner. It also means opening to the possibilities presented by powerful events and encounters. Ruti encourages a form of self-surrender in order to enhance such processes of engagement as well as tap the meaningfulness of everyday experience. The body of the text explores related questions: What is meant by character and desire? How can character be expressed ethically? How does meaningfulness arise? What modes of relationship foster character? What types of authenticity and openness to experience nurture truthful and creative living?
The answers that unfold in The Call of Character follow the lines of an optimistic Lacanian vision that might be concisely articulated as follows: There exists something called desire. It is enigmatic, but “living well” means seeking both to know and express desire. Desire energizes us and does not fit easily into rational, religious, or conventional structures of action; nor can it be known directly, however. Nevertheless, it can be sensed, because it enlivens our experience, urging us repeatedly to move in specific direct