Yoshie wrote:
> With regard to Lacan's, Althusser's, and Foucault's formulations of the
> subject, I think that there is a problem that is common to all three
> versions, which is their tendency to postulate the perfect conincidence of
> subjectification and subjection, hence their avoidance of the question of
> political agency and consciousness capable of radical social transformation
> that will undo the unfreedom of freedom that so concerned them. In all
> three writers, one can discern an ethical and aesthetic longing for the end
> of Man, the dissolution of the subject as we have known him, which may be
> characterized as a theoretical continuation of the thematics and stylistics
> of literary modernism.
Though one could say that the idea of the dissolution of the subject is
much older and more venerable than that; it occurs in orgiastic mysteries
and various forms of mysticism. It is true that these do not quite involve
"the subject as we have known him" in modernity, since this notion of the
subject is historically determined. If one wanted to follow Derrida's
genealogy of responsibility as something that was only formed in the context
of the "religions of the Book", one might say that what is trying to be
dissolved in Foucault is the subject as the bearer of responsibility.
Nonetheless, the perhaps spurious similarity to older longings for dissolution
has a certain, perhaps spurious, seductiveness.
-m
> With regard to Lacan's, Althusser's, and Foucault's formulations of the
> subject, I think that there is a problem that is common to all three
> versions, which is their tendency to postulate the perfect conincidence of
> subjectification and subjection, hence their avoidance of the question of
> political agency and consciousness capable of radical social transformation
> that will undo the unfreedom of freedom that so concerned them. In all
> three writers, one can discern an ethical and aesthetic longing for the end
> of Man, the dissolution of the subject as we have known him, which may be
> characterized as a theoretical continuation of the thematics and stylistics
> of literary modernism.
Though one could say that the idea of the dissolution of the subject is
much older and more venerable than that; it occurs in orgiastic mysteries
and various forms of mysticism. It is true that these do not quite involve
"the subject as we have known him" in modernity, since this notion of the
subject is historically determined. If one wanted to follow Derrida's
genealogy of responsibility as something that was only formed in the context
of the "religions of the Book", one might say that what is trying to be
dissolved in Foucault is the subject as the bearer of responsibility.
Nonetheless, the perhaps spurious similarity to older longings for dissolution
has a certain, perhaps spurious, seductiveness.
-m