Subject, Power, and Introjected Heteronomy

On Forms of Domination and Appearances of Freedom

Abstract

This article examines the dialectic between freedom and domination in the contemporary world through a conceptual reconstruction of a "constellation-like" nature that brings together critical theory, the analytics of power, and psychoanalysis. Challenging the hegemony of the negative conception of freedom—whose narrowness renders the intimate folds of subjugation invisible—the text proposes the notion of "introjected heteronomy" as a category that reveals an ontological and teleological dispute at the core of subjectivity, caught between the vectors of "being-for-itself" —oriented toward immanent self-fulfillment and the ethical praxis of the subject as an end in itself— and "being-for-another"—whose vital force is confiscated and diverted to satisfy the demands of an exogenous order—. Through this meticulous psychic colonization of behavior, late capitalism causes the empirical actor to assimilate systemic expropriation as the result of their free choice, inhabiting a sophisticated simulacrum of autonomy. However, it is demonstrated that the closure of the system is structurally impossible, insofar as the unassimilable remainder that characterizes the constitutively divided subject of the unconscious produces an insurmountable ethical and vital dissonance in the face of introjected norms. This subjective fissure emerges as the material condition of possibility for restoring critical agency and articulating an emancipatory social bond grounded in "Common: Solitude" where shared lack and the symptom function as the subversive reverse of administered totality.