Stubs and cockroachs The status of the residual in subjectivity and politics

Abstract

In order to think about the unhealthily conflictive character which falls upon men´s and peoples lives, it is worth to turn on the great genres of literary drama: comedy and especially tragedy. For the place of the residual (the remaining and the removed) in those individual and colective lives, it would be worth to have recourse to two categories to be found in different points of Freuds and Lacan works because it is probable that both authors could contribute to social and political philosophy: that one of the rest and the débris. The discussion about the posible relation between different types of tragedies and the analitical pertinence of each categories, can be enriched by a consideration about what men do, in our immense contemporary cities, with the garbage we produce and how we try to take it out of our lives using different procedures and technologies.