Jack never was a subject, only a placeholder for the Symbolic.

Evidence

If Jack “has always been the caretaker”, it is because his life has always been in the abuse-circuit. Jack represents an appalling structural fatality, a spectral determinism. To have “always been the caretaker” is never to have been a subject in his own right. Jack has only ever stood in for the Symbolic and the homicidal violence which is the Symbolic’s obscene underside. What, after all, is the father if not the “caretaker”, the one who (temporarily) shoulders the obligations of the Symbolic (what Jack calls “the white man’s burden”) before passing them onto the next generation? In Jack the ghosts of the past are revived — but only at the cost of his own “de-vival”. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 543

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘never a subject in his own right’ echoes the earlier hauntology claim that nothing occupies the point of origin (513).
• SEED: The white man’s burden joke in Jack’s voice is a rich thread on fatherhood as colonial caretaking.